Acknowledgements
First I would like to express my gratitude to the readers of the manuscript of this book, Elisa Heinämäki and Sergei Prozorov, for their valuable comments and discussions. I also want to thank Merja Hintsa for her assistance as I started to grapple with this impossible subject and Tuomas Parsio for his indispensable help with Greek and Latin materials as well as for his comments on my, perhaps extraordinary, reading of Plato. My deepest thank I owe to Soili Petäjäniemi-Brown, not only for having corrected my English in her efficient way, but also for her incredible patience with a writer who apparently could not finish anything.
I also want to thank the wonderful – indeed amazing – personnel of the Department of Social Science and Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, where this book was completed. My special thanks in Jyväskylä go to the members of the Plato reading group: Mikko Yrjönsuuri, Miira Tuominen and Arto Laitinen. Without them, I would never had grasped that it is not Nietzsche but Plato that cannot be read without laughing often, richly and hilariously – and that those who have not done so, have not, in a sense, read Plato at all.
To all the above-mentioned people (as well as to Markku Koivusalo and Olli-Pekka Moisio!), I also want to express my gratitude for their friendship, which in this ‘heartless’ world is the most valuable treasure one can possess, at least if we are to believe Aristotle and Cicero.
I also want to thank the series editor Michael Marder for believing in and advancing this project, as well as the various people at Bloomsbury (particularly Marie-Claire Antoine, Ally-Jane Grossan and Kaitlin Fontana) for their kind and professional help at the final steps of the project.
Academy of Finland and the Network for European Studies (University of Helsinki) provided generous funding for this research, whilst the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki provided an excellent research environment as well as a great opportunity to work with leading scholars from all over the world. Without the support of Academy, Network and Collegium, this book would have never seen the light of day.
The book is dedicated to my wife Elisa with love. I have investigated the history of conscience for years and I am still perplexed about it. She knows it by heart.
Introduction
I
‘I have followed my conscience,’ President George W. Bush announced in his farewell speech to the American people on 15 January 2009.1 In a famous speech, ‘A Politics of Conscience’, delivered on 23 June 2007, Barack Obama likewise called for an awakening of the American conscience, concluding with the following declaration: ‘So let’s rededicate ourselves to a new kind of politics – a politics of conscience.’2 Yet there is nothing particularly new in this kind of politics, since conscience has always been at the heart of Western politics. Conscience is the ‘only sure clue which will eternally guide a man,’ as Thomas Jefferson wrote.3 It has ‘a rightful authority over us’ by ‘the commission of God Almighty’, as John Adams put it.4 In his speech to his SS troops at Poznań on 4 October 1943, even Heinrich Himmler stated that the virtue of SS man did not consist of obedience for the sake of authorities, but for the sake of conscience. Actually, the only authority an SS soldier ought to have is the voice of his conscience:
It will not always be possible to verify whether the order has been carried out. With us, the verification must not, must never be left to a commissar, as it is in Russia. The only commissar we have must be our own conscience [das eigene Gewissen].5
This book is a genealogy of this uncanny voice within – and given the privileged place of conscience in Western thought, an investigation into the foundations of Western theologico-political anthropology. My intention is not so much to analyse the true nature of conscience, but rather examine how the Western tradition has understood what it has called conscience. My purpose is to give an account of the entire history of the idea since antiquity, not by trying to include all possible nuances, which would
1 George W. Bush, ‘The Farewell Address,’ accessed 24 August 2012: http://www.presidentialrhetoric. com/speeches/01.15.09.html
2 Barack Obama, ‘A Politics of Conscience,’ accessed 24 August 2012: http://www.ucc.org/news/ significant-speeches/a-politics-of-conscience.html
3 Thomas Jefferson, ‘A Letter to George Washington (May 10, 1789).’ In The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. P. L. Ford, vol. 5 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904–5), p. 476.
4 John Adams, ‘On Self-Delusion,’ in The Works of John Adams, ed. S. F. Adams, vol. 3 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1851), pp. 434–5.
5 Heinrich Himmler, ‘Rede des Reichsführer-SS bei der SS-Gruppenführertagung in Posen Am 4. Oktober 1943,’ accessed 24 August 2012: http://www.nationalsozialismus.de/dokumente/texte/ page/4
be virtually impossible, but rather by concentrating on general trends and turning points. In the chapter eight of the book, in addition, I outline a theory concerning the common essence of Western conscience. Methodologically, the study is a combination of intellectual history and genealogy of the present. As an intellectual history, it aims at a historical reconstruction of the concept and the idea of conscience, whilst the genealogical aspect of the study is materialized in its attempt to pin down the roots of the Western politics of conscience and to trace the historical sources of the contemporary ethico-political predicament of global capitalism and neoliberal ideology, whereby politics is reduced to ethics and collective action replaced by the expectations of individual responsibility.
One purpose of this book – inspired by Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of Western metaphysics as metaphysics of silence (‘sigetics’)6 – is to show that the Western ethicopolitical tradition does not include such radical reversals and ruptures as has been suggested by philosophers and intellectual historians since the 1960s but is rather characterized by a radical continuity. Despite historical change and amidst differences and disputes, one assumption has always remained the same in Western thought: in moral and political matters, people should rely on the inner voice of conscience instead of external authorities, laws and regulations. In this sense, the ethico-political tradition of the West has always been individualist, rebellious and revolutionary, even when it has been collectivist or conservative, since it has not only tirelessly strived for the displacement of external laws, rules and regulations by the disorienting experience of conscience but also wanted to found these laws and regulations on this very experience. ‘Conscience is the deepest internal solitude [innerliche Einsamkeit], from which both limit and the external have wholly disappeared,’7 as G. W. F. Hegel wrote, but at the same time it is and must be the centre of all political principles and institutions:
If political principles and institutions are separated from the realm of inwardness [Innerlichkeit], from the innermost shrine of conscience [heiligthum des Gewissens], from the still sanctuary of religion, they lack any real centre [wirkliche Mittelpunkt] and remain abstract and indeterminate.8
True, the protagonists of conscience themselves have always complained about the impotence of conscience. For them, conscience has remained powerless because the ‘world does not heed the inner witness of its own conscience’ as it should but ‘only obeys external regulations’, as Jan Amos Comenius wrote in The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart (1623),9 summarizing neatly the fundamental tenet of Western thought repeated time and again in the history of the West: the source of
6 See Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. K. Pinkus and M. Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
7 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. S. W. Dyde (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001), §136, addition, p. 115.
8 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001), p. 52. Translation modified.
9 John Comenius, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, trans. H. Louthan and A. Sterk (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1997), p. 205.
truth and justice resides within, in the innermost realm of conscience, whilst those who rely on traditions, customs, public norms and opinions are evil Pharisees (‘it is a mark of an evil man always to seek the rules and to want written laws to dictate what he ought to do’).10 But as the advocates of conscience have been compelled to admit, it is the Pharisees and not conscience who dominate the world. When it comes to ethical and political thought, however, the conscience has indeed been victorious and dominating: without the voice of conscience, the Western tradition has assumed, there is no sin, no guilt, no virtue, no obligation, no duty, no force of law, no freedom, no responsibility, no individuality, no humanity, not even consciousness:
The voice of conscience, which imposes his particular duty on each, is the ray of light on which we come forth from the infinite and are established as individual and particular beings; it draws the limits of our personality; it, therefore, is our true original component [Urbestandteil], the ground and stuff of our whole life [der Grund und der Stoff alles Lebens]. 11
This central role of the experience of conscience in the Western tradition of ethics also explains Aristotle’s relatively minor role in this study. Although Aristotle has beyond doubt provided a bunch of concepts and ideas that have been extremely influential in the Western tradition of ethics and ethical politics, there are certain tendencies in his thought that are at odds with this tradition, including his insistence that virtue is based on public opinion. A virtuous man is the one who is commonly considered virtuous (Nichomachean Ethics 1140a), whilst the vicious and shameless is the one who ‘despises public opinion’ (Rhetoric 1368b20–5).12 In the Western tradition of ethico-political thought, it is the virtuous man who despises public opinion. For the same reason, although he lived before Aristotle, Socrates features prominently in this work. Like his followers, Socrates despised public opinion, what the many said of him: ‘We must not consider at all what the many [hoi polloi] will say of us’ (Crito 48a).13 The Western man of virtue stands alone against crowds and numbers, closing ‘himself off from the whole world’.14 It is not the opinions of others, not even public norms, but his inner voice that has the ultimate authority over him – though this inner voice, so the man of conscience believes, does not work only for his benefit but rather, and even primarily, for the benefit of the whole world. This is a fundamental dogma of the Western tradition of ethics from Cynics to Stoics, from Christians to Enlightenment philosophers, from German Idealists to Nietzsche, from Heidegger to Derrida. It is true that there also exists in the Western tradition
10 Ibid., p. 204.
11 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. P. Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), p. 108.
12 In Aristotle translations I have consulted Aristotle, Aristotle in 23 Volumes, vols 19, 21 and 22, trans. H. Rackham and J. H. Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1944).
13 In Plato translations I have consulted Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997) and Plato in Twelve Volumes, vols 1, 3, 5–6 and 9, trans. H. N. Fowler, W. R. M. Lamb and P. Shorey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925–1969).
14 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, ed. H. and E. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 134.
what Friedrich Nietzsche called a morality of the Englishman: a morality of good manners (David Hume) and of little pleasures (Jeremy Bentham). Yet this morality of das Man, to use a Heideggerian term, is an exception in the Western tradition –perhaps a ridiculous exception, if we are to believe Nietzsche. Today, even the heroes of capitalism swear by the inner voice, as did Steve Jobs in his speech at Stanford University in 12 June 2005:
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown your own inner voice.15
In this regard, Western tradition is characterized by a profound shamelessness – by a curious anti-dogmatic dogmatics – and if we would like to figure out the ethicopsychological reasons for the revolutionary character of this tradition, we should, perhaps, take a clue from this fact.
II
Socrates features prominently in this study particularly because the very origin of this shameless, individualist and rebellious ethics of conscience – at least one of these origins – can be traced back to Plato’s Socratic dialogues. Unlike Socrates, the Greeks did not usually see any positive value in the experience of conscience (synoida emautō),16 associating it with pain and unhappiness, even sickness: ‘What is it? What sickness [nosos] is destroying you?’ asks Menelaus in Euripides’s Orestes (395–6), and Orestes replies: ‘My conscience [synesis], I am aware [synoida] that I have done something terrible.’17 Yet Socrates transformed this painful experience of conscience opposed to happiness into the condition of ethics and politics, even of happiness itself. In Socrates’ estimation, a good citizen was no longer one who led a virtuous
15 Stanford University News, Stanford Report, 14 June 2005, accessed 24 August 2012: http://news. stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
16 The first and the only surviving document from the Classical period where the Greek word for conscience (syneidēsis) is mentioned is Democritus’ fragment no. 297 (Diels): ‘Some people, ignorant about the decomposition of mortal nature and in the syneidēsis of evil-doing in life, endure the time of their lives in confusion and fear because of inventing lies about the time after death.’ Cited and translated by Philip Bosman, Conscience in Philo and Paul (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr 2003), p. 61. It is not until the first century bc that the noun came into more frequent usage. This does not signify, however, that the Greeks did not know the experience of conscience, as is sometimes suggested. In order to express this experience they used other nouns such as synesis or verbal compounds such as synoida emautō (‘I know with myself’) from which the noun syndeidēsis actually derives. The earliest instance of synoida emautō expressing guilty conscience can be found in the Thesmophoriazusae (476–7) of Aristophanes: ‘I know with myself of many terrible things [ksynoid’ emautē polla dein’].’ Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae, in Aristophanes with English Translation in Three Volumes, vol. 3, trans. B. B. Rogers (London: William Heinemann, 1963), pp. 170–1. Translation modified.
17 In Euripides translations I have consulted Euripides, The Complete Greek Drama, ed. W. J. Oates and E. O’Neill, Jr. Vol. 2 (New York: Random House, 1938); Euripides, Cyclops, Alcestis, Medea, ed. D. Kovacs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); and Euripides, Children of Heracles, Hippolytus, Andromache, Hecuba, ed. David Kovacs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
life according to the moral and political standards of the polis, but one who had an intimate relationship with the ‘sickness’ of conscience. According to Socrates, a good citizen ought to be continuously conscious of its possibility and welcome it whenever it occurs, because unlike for the Greeks in general, for Socrates the traumatic experience of conscience was not an experience that had to be overcome at all costs, but a positive experience constitutive of a virtuous citizen. Although his conscience, as Socrates confesses in Hippias Major (304b–e), is always blaming (oneidizō) and disgracing (elengkhō) him, he believes that ‘it is necessary to bear all that’, for ‘what is fine is hard’ – not in the sense that it is difficult to attain fine things, but in the sense that this hardness itself actualized in the humiliating experience of conscience constitutes the condition of possibility of all ethics and ethical politics.
As the Orestes passage quoted above already indicates, the intellectual backdrop of the Socratic politics of conscience lies in Greek tragedy, and more precisely in the miserable fate of the tragic hero. To the Greeks, the tragic hero was an object of pity because, having acknowledged (synoida emautō) responsibility (aitios) for his crime (hamartia), he lost all the landmarks of moral and political orientation, finding himself abandoned (erēmos), helpless (aporos), homeless (aoikos) and cityless (apolis), in the last resort absolutely nothing (mēdeis). As Creon bemoans in Antigone (1317–22):
Ah this responsibility [aitios] can never be fastened onto any other mortal so as to remove my own! It was I, yes, I, who killed you, I the wretch. I admit the truth. Lead me away, my servants, lead me from here with all haste, who am no more than a dead man [mēdeis = nobody]!18
Nonetheless, it is precisely in the fate of the tragic hero that Socrates saw a model for the formation of the ethico-political subject. This formation is characterized by three interwoven yet analytically separate moments. First, the subject is shattered by the traumatic experience of conscience and thus, subtracted from his habitual world and his innermost identity, cut out of the social bond and lost in the groundless abyss of being without rules or standards: ‘I know with myself’ (synoida emautō) that I know nothing (Apology 21b) whereby all the prevailing truths are disclosed as having no foundation whatsoever. He has become abandoned and forlorn (erēmos aporos). The second moment is when the subject recognizes that this loss of orientation, this symbolic death, entails that he is no longer constituted by the social relations of community (Gorgias 513a) but by the same experience within him that cut him off from the social bond in the first place. In other words, although the experience of conscience is a traumatic experience, it is at the same time a liberating experience. It renders the subject a sovereign individual – resembling now the condition of the Cyclops in Euripide’s Cyclops (116–20), as they, too, are ‘abandoned’ (erēmoi) and ‘solitaires’ (monades), but for this reason ‘none of them is subject to anyone’. Yet although the Socratic subject has now become sovereign and free, he is still without orientation. He has ceased to ‘mechanically’ repeat the norms and customs (nomos)
18 In Sophocles translations I have consulted Sophocles, The Plays and Fragments, ed. R. Jebbs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908).
of the polis, but at the same time he lacks the means to reorient himself in the world as even his innermost identity has become null and void. At this point, the subject has three options: he can stay in the condition of erēmos aporos outside the symbolic order of the polis, or return to the polis, either by readapting himself to its order or by remaining erēmos aporos within the walls of the polis. The first option is out of question, for it is tantamount to madness. The second option is possible, but it entails a loss of freedom, as it presupposes that the subject assumes a determinate role in the complex of social relations of the polis. It is the last option, which is the third and the final moment in the genesis of the Socratic ethico-political subject, this subject must choose. It is the moment of return to the polis, not as a member of community who assimilates himself again to the norms and the standards of the polis but as a new and superior figure of the citizen whose perspective to the affairs of the polis is no longer determined by his identity and social status, as he has none, but by the very nothing (mēdeis) disclosed at the heart of his identity through the experience of conscience. It is precisely his becoming nothing that warrants Socrates’ bold proclamation in Gorgias (521d):
I believe that I’m one of a few Athenians – so as not to say I’m not the only one, but the only one among our contemporaries – to take up the true political craft [epikherein tē hōs alēthōs politikē tekhnē] and practice politics [prattein ta politika].
In what sense, however, is the abandoned and forlorn subject, like Socrates himself, superior to normal citizens? He is superior, according to the logic of Socratic ethical politics, because a normal citizen takes care of the affairs of the polis in his own limited and partial perspective, measuring his action and responsibility according to the given norms and values. The displaced erēmos aporos, instead, measures his action according to the measureless measure of the nothing of conscience. This entails that he also takes care (epimeleomai) of the affairs of the polis (of its justice, piety and so on) (Apology 36c) in the same modality, that is to say, in the modality of unlimited responsibility (aitios). Thus the Socratic ethico-political subject is more like a tragic hero than an ordinary Athenian citizen, as the hero, too, feels the weight of absolute responsibility on his shoulders once he becomes conscious of having committed an evil deed. Unlike in tragedies, however, in Socrates’ politics of conscience all the tragic elements are put at the heart of everyday life. In Socratic ethical politics, one is no longer an erēmos aporos if one finds oneself responsible for a crime. One has to make oneself an abandoned outcast, to commit a sort of symbolic suicide (‘to live in a state as close to death as possible’, as Socrates says of himself in Phaedo 67d) by means of continuous self-accusation. In other words, the experience of synoida emautō must be purposely provoked so that the condition of erēmos aporos becomes ‘a predicate for the “I am”, ’ to paraphrase Heidegger again.19 The method of this provocation is
19 For Heidegger, it is Dasein’s quality of being-guilty (Schuldigsein) revealed by the silent call of conscience that is a predicate for the ‘I am’. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1962), p. 326. But as we will see, such a disclosure of guilt is possible only because the call first detaches Dasein from the social bond and abandons (überlassen) it to itself.
called elenchus (elengkhos). Its aim is not disclose what virtue means but to incur the traumatic experience of conscience, to reveal that all our conceptions of virtue are worthless and to elicit an absolute disorientation in terms of morality and politics, leaving us ‘abandoned and forlorn’ (erēmon kai aporon) (Philebus 16b) – for it is such an abandoned and forlorn subject that is capable of true political craft. It is not the Aristotelian zōon politikon but this Socratic subject (erēmos aporos) that is the paradigmatic figure of the Western citizen.
III
Since Socrates, and especially since the rise of Christianity, the disorienting experience of conscience has determined the framework of the Western ethical and ethico-political orientation. In this experience, which reveals the ‘real littleness of ourselves, worthy of resentment, abhorrence, and execration’,20 the Western tradition has discovered its law and its spirit, its autonomy and its freedom. It has done this quite literally, inasmuch as the Roman authors with Stoic persuasion, such as Cicero and Seneca, interpreted this experience as the foundation of natural law, allegedly expressing the immutable and eternal moral order of the world. Christians, whilst subscribing to the Ciceronian teaching of natural law, have also seen in it the realm of the Holy Spirit and God’s dwelling: ‘Conscience is a little God sitting in the middle of men’s hearts,’ as William Perkins put it.21 True, conscience lost its divine dimension during the Enlightenment, but this actually meant a strengthening of the authority of conscience, because it was freed from the Christian prerequisite according to which conscience requires supernatural aid in order properly to bear witness to natural moral law and to make a man acknowledge that he is always already guilty and thereby inexcusable.22 Not even the ultimate decline of natural law was able to erode the authority of the voice of conscience. In modernity, it has been this voice alone emanating from the abyssal ground of groundless existence that has uprooted the subject from the solid ground and left him bereft in the Nothing without moral, political or religious coordinates whatsoever, so that he may become a sovereign erēmos aporos, ‘without direction from another’ (ohne Leitung eines andern), as Kant famously put it,23 capable of absolute responsibility:
I am abandoned [délaissé] in the world [Jean-Paul Sartre writes in Being and Nothingness] not in the sense that I might remain abandoned and passive in a hostile universe like a board floating on the water, but rather in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help [seul et sans aide = erēmos aporos]
20 Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (Milton Keynes: Filiquarian Publishing, 2009), 3.3, p. 172.
21 William Perkins, A Discourse of Conscience, in William Perkins: His Pioneer Works on Casuistry, ed. T. F. Merril (Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1966), p. 9.
22 It is not a mere coincidence that Matthias Knutzen, the first renowned atheist in the modern West, named the community of his followers the community of Gewissener.
23 Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment,’ in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. M. J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 17.
engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instance.24
Now, although the experience of conscience has enjoyed a privileged place in the Western tradition, this does not mean that the history of conscience would have unfolded as monotonous repetition. Many shifts, displacements and reinterpretations have taken place in the course of its history, especially when it comes to the sources and effects of this experience. Since Cicero, on the one hand, almost everybody has agreed that the voice of conscience, although it emanates from within, is not my voice but something that ‘drives me without my willing and doing’, as the sixteenth-century Anabaptist theologian Hans Denck put it.25 Being ‘distinct from us yet present in our inmost being’,26 it renders us autonomous, as Kant had it, but we are not autonomous with regard to it as it is ‘an involuntary and irresistible drive [Trieb] in our nature’.27 In other words, the Western voice of conscience has always been an alien voice, the voice of the ‘other’ within.28 Similarly, philosophers and theologians alike have considered conscience the condition of possibility of concepts such as duty, obligation and responsibility, even freedom, resoluteness and faith. Yet they have been less unanimous, for instance, as to who or what it is that is speaking in the voice of conscience: is it God, nature, tradition, freedom, pure practical reason, parents, society, a crack in the ontological edifice of the universe, or what? After Luther, and particularly after Kant, moreover, the idea of good conscience, so dear to Christians, became increasingly suspect. Since the Church Fathers, Christians had almost unanimously subscribed to Chrysostom’s opinion that a good conscience (syneidos agathon) is the ‘greatest festival’ of a man, his glory and his gratification,29 whereas Martin Heidegger, arguably the most outstanding theorist of conscience in the twentieth century, asserts bluntly that a good conscience is not a conscience phenomenon at all.30 The reason for this turn is simple. Philosophers came to interpret the phenomenon of good conscience now as a mere absence of a bad conscience, arguing that such absence does not indicate, as it at least sometimes did in the pre-Kantian world of natural law and divine providence, presence of the Good but rather absence of sincerity: the one who seeks to be ethical must ‘avoid good conscience at all costs’, as Jacques Derrida put this modern truth.31
24 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. E. Barnes (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 701.
25 Cited in Steven E. Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 122.
26 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. M. J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 561.
27 Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, ed. P. Heath and J. B. Schneewind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 88.
28 Mladen Dolar has made this point succinctly in his study on the anatomy of Western conscience: ‘What all this tradition has in common is that the voice comes from the Other, but this is the Other within. The ethical voice is not the subject’s own, it is not for the subject to master or control it, although the subject’s autonomy is entirely dependent on it.’ Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), p. 102.
29 John Chrysostom, Sermones V de Anna 5.1, in Patrologia cursus completus: Series Graeca, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris: 1857–66), vol. 54, p. 669A. Patrologia Graeca hereafter PG.
30 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 338.
31 Jacques Derrida, Aporias: Dying – Awaiting (on another at) the Limits of Truth, trans. D. Tutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 19.
Finally, it has recently been disputed whether the voice of conscience does render the subject autonomous – whether by obeying this inner voice the subject becomes ‘self-sufficient and independent of other creatures, like unto those self-moving engines, which have their principle of motion within themselves’, as a Puritan divine had it in the seventeenth century.32 Today, the experience of conscience does not inevitably result in autonomy, which is denounced as pretentious and arrogant, indeed a false hypothesis, but rather calls autonomy radically into question. According to Emmanuel Levinas, conscience (la conscience morale) is this calling into question of autonomy:
It is the revelation of a resistance to my powers that does not counter them as a greater force, but calls into question the naïve right of my powers, my glorious spontaneity as a living being. Morality begins when freedom, instead of being justified by itself, feels itself to be arbitrary and violent.33
In many other respects, however, an astonishing unanimity prevails – and, to be honest, even the above mentioned opposition between the traditional and the Levinasian conscience is superficial, for as we will see the heteronomous experience of conscience is constitutive for freedom and even for certain happiness in Levinas as well. Excluding Spinoza, Hume and some of their followers, virtually all the notable authors in the Western tradition of moral and political thought have either preached the indispensable value of the experience of conscience or constructed theories that presuppose this experience. Although Thomas Hobbes severely criticized the Christian doctrines of conscience, he did and could not abandon conscience in his theory of the state, since he acknowledged that the concepts such as obedience and obligation presuppose it. Even Friedrich Nietzsche, though known as one of the fiercest critics of bad conscience in the history of the West, put the experience of conscience at the heart of his ethics and politics, asserting that the philosophers of the future must ‘make every Yea and Nay a matter of conscience [jedem Ja und Nein ein Gewissen macht]!’34 – and that they must do so because conscience liberates a man from the morality of custom, rendering him an ‘autonomous supramoral individual [das autonome übersittliche Individuum]’.35 As to whether such obedience to the voice of conscience is indispensable to ethics and politics, I have no position on. What I want to do in this book is to give a genealogical account of the history of conscience since antiquity and to show that conscience is not a simple solution to the ethicopolitical crisis of today. In the next chapter, in any case, we will see that it can also be harnessed for very pernicious purposes.
32 Samuel Ward, Balme from Gilead to Recouer Conscience (London: Roger Jackson, 1616), p. 21.
33 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 84.
34 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. H. L. Mencken (Tucson: See Sharp Press, 1999), §50, p. 72.
35 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. D. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 2.2, p. 41.
National Socialism and the Inner Truth
I
More than three decades before becoming Pope Benedictus XVI, the spiritual head of the Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger gave a lecture to the Reinhold Schneider-Gesellschaft called ‘Conscience in Its Age’ (Das Gewissen unserer Zeit).1 At the beginning of this lecture, he cites the following passage attributed to Adolf Hitler:
I am freeing man from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge; from the dirty and degrading self-mortification of a chimera called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and personal independence which only a very few can bear.2
On account of this quotation, Ratzinger states that the destruction of conscience is a precondition for totalitarian obedience and totalitarian domination. He then continues:
Where conscience prevails there is a barrier against the domination of human orders and human whim, something sacred that must remain inviolable and that in an ultimate sovereignty evades control not only by oneself but by every external agency. Only the absoluteness of conscience is the complete antithesis to tyranny.3
Ratzinger may be right. At least he is not alone with his views. A league of Western theologians and philosophers has claimed that the sovereignty of conscience evades, if not self-control, at least the control of every external agency. Moreover, by arguing that conscience constitutes an antithesis to tyranny, he reaches the same conclusion as Hannah Arendt, one of the most renowned analysts of National Socialism: ‘Conscience itself no longer functioned under totalitarian conditions of political organization.’4 Yet there is a certain problem in Ratzinger’s analysis. Ratzinger’s citation is taken from Hermann Rauschning’s Conversations with Hitler based on his discussions with Hitler between 1932 and 1934. In this memoir, Rauschning, the National Socialist President
1 The lecture is translated and reprinted in Joseph Ratzinger, The Church, Ecumenism, and Politics: New Essays in Ecclesiology, trans. Michael J. Miller (New York: Crossroads, 1987), pp. 165–79.
2 Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on His Real Aims (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939), p. 222. Ratzinger omits the first sentence of the Hitler passage: ‘Providence has ordained me that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity.’
3 Ratzinger, The Church, Ecumenism, and Politics, p. 166.
4 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), p. 24.
of the Danzig Senate in 1933–4, presents page after page of what are purported to be Hitler’s most intimate views and plans for the future, allegedly based on dozens of private conversations. We may wish to ask: why would Hitler have had such conversations with an almost unknown provincial officer? Although Conversations is one of the most widely quoted sources of information about Hitler’s personality and hidden intentions, its authenticity has recently been called into question. It is claimed that these discussions never took place: the words attributed to Hitler were simply invented or lifted from various sources, including the writings of Ernst Jünger and Friedrich Nietzsche.5
As to the sources that are unquestionably authentic, it is hard to find evidence in support of the claim that Hitler would have rejected the idea of conscience. On 1 February 1933, two days after his seizure of power, for instance, the new Reich Chancellor addressed the German nation with the following words: ‘We are determined, as leaders of the nation, to fulfil as a national government the task which has been given to us, swearing fidelity only to God, our conscience, and our Volk.’6 Moreover, if the conscience had been, in Hitler’s view, a dirty and degrading illusion, would it have been possible for Rudolf Hess to use the following words in a public speech given on 14 August 1934, shortly before the 19 August referendum in which ninety per cent of the voters gave their support to Hitler assuming full power as Führer and Chancellor of Germany?
Someone may say that it is not good to put all power in one hand, since Adolf Hitler might use his authority arbitrarily and thoughtlessly! To that I can only say: The conscience [Gewissen] of a moral personality is a far greater protection against the misuse of an office than is the supervision of parliament or the separation of powers. I know no one who has a stronger conscience, or is more true to his people, than Adolf Hitler … The Führer’s highest court [Instanz] is his conscience and his responsibility [Verantwortung] to his people and to history.7
In the case of National Socialism, it is of course always hard to tell sincerity from a sheer lie and real conviction from lip service and propaganda – perhaps the firmest conviction of Nazism was faith in lies, lip service and propaganda. Yet we cannot deny the fact that the National Socialists also appealed to conscience. Hitler himself appeals to conscience many times in Mein Kampf. He tells us, for instance, that when the creeping gas began to gnaw at his eyes at the front and he feared going permanently blind, it was precisely the voice of conscience that made him maintain his courage:
5 Eberhard Jäckel noted long ago that Rauschning was an unreliable source. See Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler’s Worldview: A Blueprint for Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 15–17. A recent biographer, Eckhard Jesse, goes further. According to him, Conversation is ‘untrustworthy through and through – a product of war propaganda’. Eckhard Jesse, ‘Hermann Rauschning – Der fragwürdige Kronzeuge,’ Die braune Elite II: 21 weitere biographische Skizzen, ed. Ronald Smelser et al. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993), pp. 201–2.
6 Max Domarus, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945: Band I Triumph. Erster Halbband 1932–1934 (München: Süddeutscher Verlag, 1962/3), p. 192.
7 Rudolf Hess, ‘Die Wahl Adolf Hitlers zum Führer,’ in Rudolf Hess, Reden (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1938), pp. 59–60.
‘The voice of conscience cried out immediately: Poor miserable fellow, will you start howling when there are thousands of others whose lot is a hundred times worse than yours!’8 Hitler did not reject even bad conscience – that infamous conscience that had become the main target of criticism in Friedrich Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values. Nietzsche thought that a bad conscience was a poisonous invention of the Jewish priest, but Hitler accuses the Jews of having no bad conscience.9
According to the views Hitler presented in public, the National Socialists were by no means lacking conscience. Germany needed National Socialists because they were men of conscience, and because it was only such men that were able to carry out tasks that could, even against majority opinion, save the honour of the German people. As Hitler put it in a speech given to his followers in Munich on 27 April 1923:
What our people needs is not leaders in Parliament, but those who are determined to carry through what they see to be right before God, before the world, and before their own consciences – and to carry that through, if need be, in the teeth of majorities.10
The arguably authentic private conversations – such as Hitler’s Table Talk, recorded at the initiative of Martin Bormann during the first years of the Second World War – also fail to provide any support for the idea that Hitler would have rejected the conscience, although these conversations clearly reveal his hatred of Christianity. Actually, it is precisely owing to his conscience that Hitler wants to do away with Christianity and its ‘lies’:
If anyone thinks it’s really essential to build the life of human society on a foundation of [Christian] lies, well, in my estimation, such a society is not worth preserving. If, on the other hand, one believes that [scientific] truth is the indispensable foundation, then conscience bids one intervene in the name of truth, and exterminate the lie.11
According to Ratzinger, the absoluteness of conscience is the complete antithesis of tyranny, but even the most tyrannical tyrant appeals to conscience. How is this possible? Is it possible because National Socialism is Catholicism without Christianity, as Martin Bormann once suggested?12 This would, of course, be an outrageous claim. Or is it possible because of different conceptions of what conscience means? This is not easy to establish inasmuch as Hitler never defined the notion. What we can do is
8 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. J. Murphy (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1939), p. 164, accessed 24 August 2012: http://archive.org/details/MeinKampf_483
9 ‘As the leader of the trades union movement, he [the Jew] has no pangs of conscience [Gewissensbisse] about putting forward demands which not only go beyond the declared purpose of the movement but could not be carried into effect without ruining the national economic structure.’ Ibid., p. 252. Translation modified.
10 Ernst Boepple, ed., Adolf Hitlers Reden (München: Deutscher Volksverlag, 1933), p. 62.
11 H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed., Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944 (New York: Enigma Books, 2008), p. 231.
12 See Joachim C. Fest, Das Gesicht des Dritten Reiches: Profile einer totalitären Herrschaft (München: Piper, 2002), p. 175.
to examine Ratzinger’s definition of conscience and compare it with Hitler’s usage of the term.
Ratzinger’s most comprehensive analysis of conscience can be found in his article entitled ‘Conscience and Truth’, originally presented as the keynote address for the Tenth Bishops’ Workshop of the National Catholic Bioethics Centre that took place in February 1991 in Dallas, Texas. In it Ratzinger criticizes the subjectivist (and in his view liberal) interpretation of conscience, stating that the medieval tradition was right in distinguishing two levels of conscience: subjective conscientia and objective synderesis. Ratzinger interprets this objective or ontological conscience to mean what the Apostle Paul says in the second part of the letter to the Romans (2.15): a law written in the hearts of men. According to Ratzinger, this ‘ontological level’ of conscience ‘consists in the fact that something like a primal memory of the good and true (both are identical) has been implanted in us’.13 If this ontological level is not taken into account, the empirical experience of conscience (when ‘each person determines his own standards’) paves the way for relativism, superficial conviction and social conformity.14 In other words, the conscience must be attentive to ‘unconscious’ truth by striving to become aware of it, this truth that is implanted in our very being, in order to become a ‘good’ conscience – not in the sense that it would no longer be capable of perceiving guilt, but in the very opposite sense, perceiving its guilt as acutely as possible.15 This is also, according to Ratzinger, what distinguishes the conscience of such ‘criminals of conviction’ as Hitler and Stalin from the correct conscience: the cause of their moral depravity was not that they lacked conscience or conviction but that their consciences were deaf to the ‘internal promptings of truth.’16
Now, if Hitler had relied on the ‘subjectivist interpretation’ of conscience, Ratzinger’s critique would hit the mark. Hitler forgot the ‘truth’. Yet we remember what Hitler said in the passage quoted above: ‘Conscience bids one intervene in the name of truth, and exterminate the lie.’ In other words, it is not the voice of conscience that legitimizes intervention. It is truth abiding in conscience that makes intervention legitimate.17 Of course, this passage does not contain any reference to a ‘truth’ that would explicitly reside within us as a natural law written in the heart by God. Yet it is not entirely clear that Hitler would not have believed in an inner truth. Among the ranks of the National Socialists, there were many who believed in the inner truth. According to Ratzinger, the possibility of the anamnesis of the origin results from the ‘godlike constitution of our being’,18 but if we examine the writings of the leading Nazi ideologues it becomes soon clear that many of them also believed in this godlike constitution. This is, in fact, one of the most conspicuous features of their anthropology:
13 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Conscience and Truth,’ in Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, On Conscience (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2007), pp. 32–3.
14 Ibid., pp. 16–21.
15 Ibid., pp. 13–19. This is also the place where the papacy enters the game: the Pope is the ‘advocate of the Christian memory’. Ibid., p. 36.
16 Ibid., p. 38.
17 ‘I believe in truth. I’m sure that, in the long run, truth must be victorious.’ Trevor-Roper, ed., Hitler’s Table Talk, p. 259.
18 Ratzinger, ‘Conscience and Truth’, in On Conscience, p, 32.
We seek God nowhere but in ourselves. For us the soul is divine, of which the Jew, on the other hand, knows nothing: The Kingdom of Heaven is within you (Luke 17.22), thus God also, who belongs to the Kingdom of Heaven. We feel our soul is immortal, eternal from the beginning, and therefore we refuse to be told that we are created from nothingness.19
Thus wrote Hitler’s spiritual mentor Dietrich Eckart (to whom Hitler dedicated Mein Kampf ) at the end of the 1910s. Analogously, one of the leading Nazi propagandists, Alfred Rosenberg, declared: ‘The Nordic spiritual inheritance comprised consciousness not only of the divinity of the human soul, but of its equality with God.’20 To a Christian this might be tantamount to blasphemy. There is a fundamental difference between being created in the image of God and being God. Yet the issue is perhaps more complicated than it seems. On the one hand, Rosenberg does not claim that the divinity within the human soul is immediately present to consciousness, but emphasizes that it requires ‘inner work’ for one to become conscious of it.21 On the other hand, rather than from pagan sources, Rosenberg acquired the idea of human divinity from the Dominican priest Meister Eckhart, who believed that there is a divine spark hidden in every human soul.22 It is true that Eckhart was accused of heresy by the papal authority, but if we examine the historical background of his idea of the divine spark, it is not clear, objectively speaking, whether it is heretical at all. On the contrary, it is quite evident that Eckhart’s spark of the soul (or the ‘ground of the soul’ as he also called it) is a mere transposition of the Scholastic synderesis , defined as the divine remnant of the fall within the soul of man. During the Middle Ages, this idea was by no means heretical. Rather, it was one of the most firmly established truths of the Catholic Church. For the Catholics, it remains a truth – as also illustrated by Ratzinger taking it as the point of departure in his analysis of the ontological conscience to which he, not unlike Eckhart, refers as the ground of man’s being and existence. 23
II
All in all, it seems impossible to reserve the idea of conscience exclusively for good Christian, liberal or democratic purposes by denying the authenticity of the appeals to conscience in the cases where these purposes have been refuted. The inner voice of conscience may help, or even force, one to resist the lure of totalitarianism, but it would be erroneous to believe that totalitarianism is antithetical to conscience as such.
19 Cited in Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 30.
20 Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (München: Hoheneichen Verlag, 1933), p. 246.
21 Ibid., pp. 221–2.
22 Ibid., pp. 216–59.
23 See Ratzinger, ‘Conscience and Truth,’ in On Conscience, pp. 16, 32.
In addition to the words of Heinrich Himmler at Poznań already cited consider Alfred Rosenberg’s following words in his Myth of the 20th Century:
The inner voice [innere Stimme] now demands that the myth of blood and the myth of soul, race and ego, Volk and personality, blood and honour; that this myth, alone and uncompromisingly, must penetrate, bear and determine all life. It demands that, for the German people, the two million dead heroes must not have died in vain. It demands a world revolution and will tolerate no high values in its vicinity other than its own.24
It must be taken into account, moreover, that Rosenberg was by no means the only theoretically minded supporter of the German totalitarian regime who believed that the truth resides in the inner voice of conscience, for we very well know that even the most outstanding theorist of conscience in the twentieth century – Martin Heidegger – was a member of the Nazi Party, the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). Given the influence of Heidegger’s philosophy on twentieth-century thought, especially in Europe, his analysis of conscience merits closer investigation.
The call of Heidegger’s conscience
Like Ratzinger and the medieval schoolmen, Heidegger differentiates between the ontological and empirical (‘ontic’) conscience. ‘Ontic’ conscience is the empirical voice of conscience that murmurs back when I have done something wrong or warns me if I am about to do so. This is not the conscience in which Heidegger is primarily interested. According to him, the empirical experience of conscience is merely a derivative of a more profound ontological ‘call of conscience’ (Ruf des Gewissens). What, then, is this ontological call? Its structure and function is almost diametrically opposite to Sigmund Freud’s conception conscience as superego, made famous a few years before Heidegger’s analysis of conscience in Being and Time. 25 Freud thought that the voice of conscience is the voice of the father and, in broader terms, the voice of the authorities and moral norms of the surrounding society, but Heidegger saw its call as the very instance which liberates man or what Heidegger calls Dasein from the these authorities and norms. In fact, the call of conscience liberates Dasein from everything in the surrounding world. This is not to say that Heidegger would have thought that people are usually free from the authorities, rules and opinions of society. On the contrary, these authorities, rules and opinions determine his conduct almost without an exception, as conformism is, as he claims, the rule rather than exception in human societies. For the most part, to use Heidegger’s idiosyncratic language,
24 Rosenberg, Der Mythus, p. 699. Unlike the German people, Rosenberg continues, the Jewish race has no inner voice by which to live: it is slavishly dependent on artificial constructions that amount to mere methods of life-management rather than to a true expression of what it means to live as a human being.
25 It is beyond doubt that Heidegger knew Freud’s concept of concience, for even though he does not refer to Freud in Being and Time, he refers to H. G. Stoker’s Das Gewissen, in which there is a lengthy analysis of Freud’s reduction of conscience to what he calls superego.
every Dasein is a ‘fallen’ and inauthentic being lost in the world of the so-called ‘they’ (das Man). Dasein says what the others say and does what the others do. It obeys the rules of society because this is how others behave. It even breaks the rules of society because other people break them. Whatever it does, it does on account of others, not because it has determined by itself, by virtue of its own potentiality, to engage in such and such action. Therefore, when Dasein is lost in das Man, its choices are not merely irresponsible, but more profoundly, it does not really choose at all. Everything is always-already chosen for it. All its possibilities in future – its ‘potentiality-forBeing’ – are already decided: ‘The “they” has always kept Dasein from taking hold of the possibilities of Being.’26 Moreover, given that the ‘they’ is nobody rather than somebody, it remains indefinite who has actually done the choosing. Hence, the only choice that an inauthentic Dasein is capable of is to choose what is already chosen by the ‘nobody’: ‘So Dasein make no choices.’27 This is why Dasein’s way of being in the world is characterized not by occasional irresponsibility, but irresponsibility that penetrates to the very core of its being.
According to Heidegger, however, this inauthentic and irresponsible way of being is not Dasein’s irrevocable fate. Dasein can escape it by attuning itself to the call of conscience. But how does this happen? Heidegger explains: Dasein must withdraw from the possibilities that are ‘present-at-hand’ for it in the immediate everyday environment of the ‘they’. It must first choose not to choose any of these possibilities.28 For Heidegger, this choice – the choice to suspend choosing – is, in fact, the first authentic choice, which makes genuine choosing possible in the first place: ‘In choosing to make this choice, Dasein makes possible, first and foremost, its authentic potentiality-for-Being.’29 By choosing to suspend the possibilities disclosed in the immediate everyday environment, Dasein chooses itself, its own possibilities. In this choosing, Dasein transforms the ‘mixture of circumstances and accidents’30 into a situation of its own. Heidegger calls the existential structure of choosing resoluteness (Entschlossenheit). It signifies ‘letting oneself be summoned [Aufruf] out of one’s lostness in the “they”. ’31 It is here that conscience (Gewissen) enters the play. It is the call of conscience, ‘coming from me and yet beyond me’,32 that ‘summons Dasein’s Self from its lostness’ in the ‘they’.33 In order to become authentic, Dasein has to be resolute as regards the call of conscience. This is not to say that Dasein now of his own will chooses conscience, for Heidegger insists that conscience cannot be chosen. In point of fact, even the first choice to suspend choosing presupposes something
26 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 312.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., p. 313.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., p. 346.
31 Ibid., p. 345.
32 ‘Indeed the call is precisely something which we ourselves have neither planned nor prepared for nor voluntarily performed, nor have we ever done so. “It” calls, against our expectations and even against our will. On the other hand, the call undoubtedly does not come from someone else who is with me in the world. The call comes from me and yet from beyond me.’ Ibid., p. 320.
33 Ibid., p. 319.
that escapes Dasein’s own will. It presupposes something that radically disturbs its everyday existence, a disorienting experience Heidegger calls anxiety (Angst). Whatever the source of this anxiety in the everyday world, it is this mood that makes manifest in Dasein its being towards its ownmost potentiality-for-Being and thereby enables it resolutely to suspend everyday possibilities at hand.34 Neither such anxiety nor conscience can be chosen. According to Heidegger, however, Dasein can and indeed must choose to want to have a conscience.35 Indeed, it is this wanting-to-haveconscience (Gewissenhabenwollen) that liberates Dasein from its lostness in the ‘they’ and it does so precisely because this wanting entails readiness for anxiety.36
In what sense, however, such wanting is liberating? It is liberating because the call of conscience, which calls against our expectations and against our will, says nothing: ‘The call asserts nothing, gives no information about the events of the world, it has nothing to tell.’37 Anxiety prepares us for the call of conscience, but at the same time the silence of conscience itself is the primordial source of anxiety at the root of all everyday sources – and it is this primordial source that liberates Dasein. In the silent ‘anxiety of conscience’,38 Dasein bypasses the noise of the everyday world, the world of das Man:
In calling the one to whom the appeal is made, it [conscience] does not call him into the public idle talk of the ‘they,’ but calls him back from this into the reticence of his existent potentiality-for-Being.39
In other words, the silent call of conscience relentlessly individualizes Dasein down to itself.40 It detaches Dasein from the social bond and abandons (überlassen) it to itself. It is in this uncanny (unheimlich) silence and solitude, in this anxiety of conscience, that Dasein comes face to face with itself and particularly with the fact that it is radically free – free for the freedom of choosing its own potentiality-for-Being and taking hold of itself.41
Such freedom, however, is not the only thing the silent call implies. At the same time, it enables Dasein to become aware that it is guilty – not only on some occasions but always already, permanently and irremediably.42 The silence of the call of conscience makes Dasein understand that its most primordial potentiality-for-Being is that of Being-guilty (Schuldigsein). What is this ‘Being-guilty’? Heidegger first says what it is not. In his view, the idea of Being-guilty must be dissociated from any law such that ‘by failing to comply with it one loads himself with guilt’.43 Such guilt relates to the inauthentic everyday experience of conscience, either pricking or warning,
34 Ibid., p. 323.
35 Ibid., p. 334.
36 Ibid., p. 342.
37 Ibid., p. 318.
38 Ibid., p. 342.
39 Ibid., p. 322.
40 Ibid., p. 354. ‘Conscience, in its basis and its essence, is in each case mine. Ibid., p. 323.
41 Ibid., p. 232.
42 Ibid., p. 353.
43 Ibid., p. 328.
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
Come, we will go and see how calm he looks in his majestic repose;” and, without waiting for a reply, he drew her in through the heavilywrought curtains to the large, dimly-illumined apartment, where rested a metal burial-case which contained all that was earthly of the grayhaired chief, known as Morrillo, the bandit’s pride, there in the gloomy fortress, and as Claudius Etheredge in the brilliant Roman home. But none who met him at the brave display of chivalry, or in the more courtly halls of etiquette, dreamed their haughty yet affable host was the famous Morrillo, whom they feared and dreaded.
“He was my own dear friend,” Arabel said, in a low voice. “How will you bury him?” she added, quickly, thinking of her own parents.
A mournful smile lighted Claud’s beautiful face for a moment as he replied, “Tonight the carriage will come from Etheredge Hall, and tomorrow he will be buried in state from our royal home. I shall be chief mourner, sole mourner as to that part, except a few fawning relatives, who know nothing of the dead, except that he is reputed to leave a princely fortune;” and a darkly bitter smile crossed the young Italian’s face. “I hate such detestable hypocrisy,” he said, “but my father always had it to bear, and I must take his place in everything. So help me, father!” and he bowed his head, and laid his hand on the cold, damp brow.
Arabel was startled, alarmed, terrified, at his strange words. “How can he go to Etheredge Hall?” she said, “Lord Etheredge is away, and does not expect to return for thirty days, at least.”
“How know you?” exclaimed Claud, earnestly.
“My Uncle Fay Ortono, who married Lady Emelie Etheredge, half sister to the noble lord,” was the reply
“Then they are not your relatives,” he said. “But tell me, Bel, if you can keep a secret.”
She nodded, silently and wonderingly.
“What is my name?” he asked.
“Claud Morrillo,” said Arabel, proudly.
Claud smiled sadly, and said, “Yes, to you I am; but I have two names. Now, mind what I say, Arabel,” he said, sternly grasping her
arm; “my father and Lord Etheredge are one and the same person, and I am now to take his title, and be Lord Etheredge in his stead. But, by the acquaintance we have had with each other, Arabel Ortono, and by the remembrance of our many meetings here, I warn you to tell no one of what I have said tonight.”
Then tearfully they parted, that warm, soft night; Arabel to weep until slumber closed her weary lids, and brought gay visions of future happiness; Claud to return to the fortress, arrange his father’s business, snatch a single hour of deep, unrefreshing repose, and, as the bell on the high tower rung out the mystic midnight hour of twelve, to see his father’s form placed in his own private carriage and whirl rapidly away, drawn by his own splendidly caparisoned horses.
As morning dawned, Claud left the fortress in the care of the banditti, and went in a disguised conveyance to his home in Rome, and spent half the hours of that long day in pacing up and down the gorgeous rooms. Friends called, but he steadily refused himself to them; relatives arrived, but he kept from them in scorn. At last another guest was announced. It was Fay Ortono, Lady Emelie and Luella having accompanied him to the burial. Deeply and truly did they sympathize with the young lord, and he appreciated their disinterestedness; for were they not Arabel’s nearest friends; and might he not, through them, become better acquainted with her?
At sunset, that night, Lord Etheredge was buried. Waxen tapers were lit in the damp tomb, and heavy, mellow-toned bells tolled out the last requiem of departed worth.
“He is not an infidel!” murmured Arabel, joyfully. “Mother in heaven! Claud is good; for he believes, and the monks have said mass for him.”
Another half-year went by with magic rapidity. Again came the luscious harvest-time, and again the girls were needed more than ever at the vineyard, when death came again; and this time, O terror, Uncle Fay was called. The girls worked nobly, so said Lady Emelie; they should be rewarded for it, and so they were; but when winter came, they could stay no longer, and, by Claud’s invitation, they went together to the fortress, and determined to make it, for a short time, their home. There was but one female there at the time, and she was
the most silent of her famously loquacious sex. The girls lived very pleasantly together, sometimes for whole weeks seeing no one besides themselves, and again having company every day, when Claud was about. But all this time Luella was fading. Her breath came quick and painful, her pale cheeks wore a bright flush, and her firm step faltered. Claud was first to make the sad discovery. He had been away on a cruise, and, upon his return, had taken the fortress for his home once more.
“You shall have all the physicians in Venice,” said the silent housekeeper, as she saw how sick the girl was growing, “and the best nurse in all Italy, rather than die so young.”
But it all availed nothing; she was dying. Aunt Emelie rode over in her own beautiful carriage to take her back to the vineyard, but she did not go. All the long winter she looked from the high, arched windows, and when the warm spring air stole in through the rich, soft curtains, the light reburned in her eyes, and she felt her strength returning. Then they thought she would soon be well, and even she herself was for a short time deceived.
But another subject was now uppermost in their minds. Christa was to leave them for the vinter’s home. She was married in the dim old cathedral, and a long train of attendants swept gaily out, for it was grand to be married beneath the roof-tree of the young Lord Etheredge, no one but Arabel knowing that the fortress was the bandit’s hiding-place, and she, like a discreet girl, kept her own counsel, and allowed them all to live in blissful ignorance.
Then Arabel was wedded, too, with lilies in her jeweled bouquetholder, and knots of pearls in her long golden brown curls; with a long embroidered veil floating round her slight form, and her heavy blonde sleeves caught up with pearls upon the shoulders of her satin spencer. Luella kissed her tenderly, as a mother would a happy child, then passed her hands over her smooth, dancing curls, and smiled to see them roll up again.
“I know I look pretty, Lu,” Arabel said; “for when we stood together by the statues, just now, Claud said, Luella was a perfect representation of pride perfectly subdued; but Bel was a Diana when moving, and a Madonna when still.”
Luella only smiled at her sister’s words. She knew Arabel was not vain, and she had no fears for the future when her easy-chair was placed in the large cathedral to witness the brilliant bridal. “Have I no sister now?” she asked, half sadly, half playfully, as Arabel danced by her, all radiant in her glorious beauty.
“Certainly,” answered a manly voice beside her; “she does not love the old friend less, but loves the new one more.”
Luella turned quickly, and met a pair of searching blue eyes fixed upon her beautiful face. “I beg pardon, lady,” said the man, in a slightly confused tone, “I thought I was a stranger here, but I believe we have met before.”
“It may be,” said Luella, thoughtfully; “your voice is familiar, but your looks I have forgotton.” Then suddenly remembering herself, she added, “Were you ever at Orton Village vineyard?”
The puzzled look left his face, as he replied, “So we are not entirely unacquainted. May I ask how you succeeded in the work you was engaged in when we last met?”
“Very well,” was her reply; “even better than I expected.”
“Then you are Lady Ortono?” he persisted.
“Yes; that is, I am recorded so. But I choose to be called by my own simple name. I am only unwilling to believe that might makes right.”
“You do not mean to say it was from entirely disinterested motives that you strove so hard for the name of Ortono?” said the stranger, wonderingly. “You had the property restored, had you not?”
“No, Mons. Jerold,” she replied; “I have no wealth, no honor, no family. I honor you and your band, for your steady attachment to each other I could wish that the business you follow was more lawful, and the firmness you evince was in a better cause. Adieu, Mons. Jerold;” and, with a pleasant smile, and a graceful wave of her thin, white hand, she glided away, leaving the bandit captain laughing at his own inquisitiveness, and vexed that he could not be an equal with the fair girl, who had only her own native pride to support the high position she had taken.
All those long, warm days, Luella had been lingering like a spirit, only half confined to earth; and now the hectic flush burned deeper, and her eyes flashed with renewed brilliancy; the blue veins, like a network of azure threads, were traced on her pure brow, and her hands grew more transparent every day.
With the best medical attendance, and the kindest care that could be procured, she felt that she was soon to pass away, and she often spoke of death.
“Bury me down by the water’s edge,” she said one night, when they were watching, from the high windows, the moonlight on the dancing waves. “Not in the sparkling sand here by the friendly tower, but away out, where the shadows are long and dark, where the pure white cliff is rising in the still night, a watcher over the gulf. Then, when night comes again, I will come back to earth and tell you how I live.”
And, before another moon had waxed and waned, Luella slept the sleep that knows no waking. And they buried her under the pure chalky cliff, where she had so often watched the sea-gulls at the approach of a storm.
Arabel and Christa mourned for their sister, but Claud had just become interested in the ideas of America as a grand resort. Arabel was all on the qui vive to go, and, without one regret, with only a parting farewell for Christa, and an earnest, gentle look at Luella’s grave, she entered the boat with a light step and a light heart, and bade adieu to her native land, perhaps forever. When they were far out at sea, the last object on which her eyes rested was the pure white cliff under which Luella slept. When they came in sight of land again it was only a single hour past midnight, but the long, loud cry that rung out from the stationed watch awakened every sleeper, and called up the eager and curious to catch the first glimpse of land.
“Where are we now?” Arabel said, as she went upon deck, and felt the land breeze sweeping around her, and filling the long flapping sails.
“We have reached our destination,” answered Harris, as Claud directed the sailors to call him, for he felt that it was necessary to have a new name for every place, to prevent suspicion.
Then fourteen of the crew manned a boat, and went ashore to make discoveries; they returned at night-fall, having discovered the place in Saugus known to this day as Pirate’s Glen, and still bearing the evidence of having been inhabited. The next day there were heavy black clouds in the horizon, and at night they burst in all their mad fury, causing the black waves to seethe and boil against the rough rocks in sight, and frightening Arabel almost away from her senses.
“We shall die, Claud, I know we shall,” she moaned, wearily grasping the silken covering to the lounge on which she lay. Then she fainted. Harris remembered a small public house he had seen upon the beach, and determined that, be the consequences what they might, he would reach that. The men readily volunteered to accompany them, and this brings us back to the point where we started, the night that first gave Wallace an acquaintance with the band of men that afterward frequented Pirates’ Glen and Dungeon Rock. It was, perhaps, a week that they spent there, and then returned again to Italy; not, however, until they had aroused the suspicions of the settlers, who were on the constant lookout for danger.
A few weeks after their return, a great rebellion arose in Spain. Claud must go; Arabel dared not,—so she remained at the fortress, with her own thoughts and the gorgeous works of art for company, and he started on the wild and perilous adventure. When he returned the boats were loaded with costly articles that had the indelible Spanish stamp upon them. These he secreted in the ancient fort. Some were carried away up to their hiding place in Wales, and others were retained in Spain. The greater part, however, were brought there, and to Arabel’s eager, childish questions of where he found them, and what they were for, he only answered, with a sober smile, “They are all to be changed into money, Bel, unless you want some of them to wear.”
But he heard flying rumors that he was suspected even there. “That must not be,” he said, firmly; “for I dread the idea of being known as a pirate. I cannot, will not, bear it.”
So he packed the goods he had stolen from the imperial Spanish palace, all the beautiful adornings of the fair young queen,—for it was she whom Don Jose had called little Cristelle in the first part of our story,—and hid them in the low vaulted basement. Don Jose had been
the queen’s valet, and Claud took him to be of future use to them in discovering the secrets concerning their enterprise in Spain. Then he opened the doors of the ancient tower and fortress; lighted up the long cathedral, with its dim arches, and quaint oaken carving, and gave his friends in Rome and Venice a banquet, at which he and his young bride presided. The rooms were crowded with beauty and fashion; music floated through the long corridors, and up and down the winding stairs, covered for the occasion with rich, soft carpets. The night passed in revelry, and when morning dawned the guests departed satisfied.
To Arabel it seemed like a fairy dream of beauty, so much life and joy around; to Claud it was the hollow formalities of hypocrisy. He saw the eager glances, the suspicious looks, the cautious steps, when they entered the dim old rooms. He could bear his double part well, however, and he did. It was not long after this that he carried the most suspicious goods across the water, and landed them in the then unbroken solitude of Pirates’ Glen.
By this time the foundery was nearly built. All the men of the place met there to talk over their affairs, and here it was that Claud, or rather Harris, used to station a watch, and sometimes he would stay himself to hear what was said, and direct his own work accordingly.
Arabel had been staying at the Glen several days, and begged that she might stop still longer,—the woody glade was so wild, and the distant hills so high. She was not obliged to practice constant deception there; she would remain a little while; and she did one whole long day alone, but she was used to solitude.
That night the band was organized; it was to consist of six men, with Veale for a leader, making seven beside Harris. There was another such band in Italy; one in Spain, the beautiful land of legends and romance; one in sunny, pleasant France; and one away in muddy Wales, where meadows are greener and brighter for the stagnant water beneath, and the ruinous old castle home of a former feudal lord was damp and gray with age.
Two days Arabel remained in the glen alone, then Harris came back from the boat with Don Jose; he appeared almost savage to
Arabel, but he soon learned that she was the leader’s bride, and could do as she chose.
At this time the first history, that is considered as really authentic, is commenced. A vessel, afterward known as the phantom ship, was seen in the waters off Nahant, at or near sunrise. It presented to the eye a strange optical delusion of a ship resting motionless upon the water, and another, the exact counterpart of the first, suspended keel upwards in the air; the masts and rigging of the two apparently touching each other. It was the pirate ship Arabel, that had come too far in at high tide, and was therefore obliged to wait until the water rose again in order to get out to sea.
Don Jose returned to Spain, but his honor was gone, his queen dethroned, and he himself treated like a traitor on all sides. “I’ll not have the name without the game, I reckon,” he said, with true Spanish bitterness; and taking his only living relative, a boy about twelve years of age, left him by his sister, he joined the banditti as a wanderer, and not as a resident, determined to wreak his vengeance on the Spanish government.
The next time the pirates came to America, Don Jose and the boy both accompanied them. They landed early in the morning, and the boy Carl took his place in the village as spy. All the long day he wandered up and down, his quick ear catching every suspicious word, and at night, while returning to the place fixed upon as the lookout, he arranged the whole matter in his mind, making an accurate calculation of how many reliable men the settlement numbered when they would make their exploration, etc. By the time he had settled it all in his own thoughts he arrived at “Lookout Hill,” or “High Rock,” as it is now called. With a light, eager step, he clambered up the rocks, and reached the firm platform upon the top. Soon he espied a moving speck far out upon the blue waves, and immediately hoisting the signal agreed upon, he raised a small glass to his eye, and commenced scanning the distant object. He was dressed in the Spanish costume of that day; but there was an oriental richness about it which is now lost to the world. It looked more like the Turkish apparel of the present time; the flowing trousers and tunic giving a graceful air to his slender form, and quick, agile motions; and the whole occurrence gave rise to the interesting novelette entitled, “The Child of the Sea.”
“What success, Carl?” asked Don Jose, as he came up the long path from the boat-landing, and clasped the boy in his arms.
“The best, father,” was the reply, “but they are to have a meeting tonight, which it will be best for some one of us to attend.” He then told what he had heard through the day, and with his help the father rehearsed it again to the band.
“I must go,” said Harris, springing up and preparing to leave.
“Why you, Sir Harris?” asked several voices.
“For this reason,” answered Harris, thoughtfully; “Don Jose has just shown himself incapable of remembering, by being unable to repeat, Carl’s story; Veal always needs to hear a story twice in order to comprehend it; and the rest are not interested enough to understand correctly, or report accurately; therefore I must go, or little Carl,” he added, turning to the boy, who rose from his reclining posture and stood beside his commander.
“I am not afraid, signor,” he said, firmly; “but it needs an older head and truer skill than mine to study the craft of Englishmen.”
“Truly spoken, Carl,” answered Harris; “but you shall take my place here,” and, pushing aside the heavy sail, he entered a little room arranged for Arabel’s accommodation, followed by Carl.
“I am going over to the settlement, Bel,” he said “and have brought you a new valet to entertain you while I am gone; if you like his appearance, he shall be your page for the future.”
Arabel raised her eyes from the delicate chessboard, on which she was listlessly arranging the men, and met Carl’s earnest childish gaze with a pleasant smile. “But why must you go, Harris, there are enough beside you,” she said, turning to him.
“We are liable to be routed from here at any time,” he replied, “and I alone can manage the part of spy, and decide when to remove.” And away he went, leaving Carl established in his new honors.
“I wish that I might die,” said Arabel, passionately, that night, after she had heard Carl’s story of the great robbery, and listened to his bewitching recital of the time when the young queen called him her little page, and he supported her train in passing through the corridor,
or held her fan in the audience chamber. He did not know how intimately connected his beautiful mistress and brave young commander were with the robber Morrillo and his powerful band. “I wish I had died long ago, in the little cottage by the waterside; not when my mother did; so pure and calm was her spirit, mine would have looked dark beside it; but, I was wild and thoughtless then. Methinks I have lived a thousand years since that strange brightness passed away. Where are you, mother? O, come back to me,—to your own Arabel!”
Even then there was a raging fever heat in her veins, and a delirious, wildering look in her dark eyes. Long before the morning dawned, Harris returned to the Glen. The men noted his mischievous, glancing smile, more than his stern, commanding look, as he came out from the thick underbrush, and waved his hand as a signal for them to stop.
“Have you removed and secured all your valuables?” he asked, “for I have an inkling, from what has been said tonight, that they will soon be on our track.”
“We have moved them all,” was the reply, “and are now waiting for you to tell us what shall be done with our Madonna tonight. We might leave her there, if we were sure Sir Wolf would wed her before daybreak; but, then, she is a woman, and will be certain sure to do as she is not wanted to.”
“Hold your peace, Don Jose!” thundered Harris, “or we will know the reason. I would have you to know that my wife is your queen;” and there was a slight, mocking emphasis on the words, which brought back the courage of the abashed Don Jose. “Remember you are seven in number and one in thought,” added Harris, as he turned to leave them; “and now go on with your work.”
Then he retraced his steps to the deserted Glen, and knelt by the couch where Arabel had thrown herself. Her eyes were closed; one white hand lay above her head, half shaded by the rich fold, of her satin dress, that looked, with its glittering ornaments, better fitted for a bridal or a banquet, than for that lonely forest home.
“Mother,” she moaned, faintly, “I am not dying; I shall not die.”
“Arabel,” said Harris, softly.
“I did obey you, mother. I spoke my marriage vows, kneeling by the altar side,” she went on; “the priest’s white robes swept by us, and the holy prayers went softly up to God in the twilight.”
“Yes, Bel, we were married in proper order; but don’t stop to talk of that,” Harris said again. “I want to ask you how much misery you can bear?”
Slowly she opened her large dark eyes, and fixed them on his face. “I can bear all things, for I am strong,” she replied, quoting his own words on a former occasion.
Harris paused; a momentary shudder passed over him, and he asked, “Would you not like to be back to Italy?”
“Not yet,” she answered, for she feared the idea of being known and recognized as the pirate’s bride, and felt that she was not strong enough to carry out her two parts.
Then he told her how and why they must leave the Glen, pointed out the slight but perfect trail they had formed, and took his own pocket compass to show her how she could tell in what direction they each lay from each other.
The next morning there was no trace of human life at the Glen; but away across thick, densely-growing wood, and low, slimy swamps, where the high cliff rose in bold relief against the fiery eastern sky, two living beings could be seen upon the firm land, where a natural road wound round the brow of the rocky hill. They were Harris and Carl, the rest having left some time before, and they were now going to join them, leaving Arabel alone there in the large chamber which the earth’s convulsions had formed in the solid rock.
Noon came; the sun was pouring its fiercest rays upon the high hill, and Arabel wandered to the thick vines with which the open door of the entrance had been concealed, to catch, if she might, a single breath of air to cool her throbbing brow. Suddenly, away where the tiny, trembling needle told her to look for her former abiding place, she saw a light smoke curling up. Instinctively she trembled with fear, forgetting that the whole wood might be consumed, and still the sheltering rock remain uninjured. “I must see what it is,” she said; and, climbing slowly
up the rocks, she reached the top, and proudly, fearlessly looked down below. Scarcely discernible in the thick shadows she saw a party of men, armed with flaming torches, creeping cautiously on toward the Glen. She laughed a wild, ringing laugh, that echoed far and wide; and for many years the weird-like story of the phantom lady, decked in silks and jewels, and laughing at those who tried to discover the pirates’ treasures, was told beside the fire, in the long winter evenings, until at last it was thrown aside as a superstitious falsehood, and now is only remembered in a few families as a quaint legend of former years.
It was only two short days from then that Harris returned, but Bel was a spirit. The excitement of those fearful hours had been too much for her. She drew the downy, silken couch to the side of the spring in the rock, where the clear water fell from the crevices above, with a musical tinkle, into a large open basin below, and there, in that silent room,
“She
rested her fair pale face alone
By the cool bright spring in the hallowed stone;”
her jewelled hand supporting her head, crowned with its tiara of velvet and pearls, her long brown hair floating like a veil over her richlywrought dress, and her slippered feet resting on a smooth slab of Italian marble, which had been brought there to confine the waters in the spring.
And thus they found her, sleeping calmly, peacefully, her eyes closed tightly, and her teeth set firmly together. There was a strange calmness in Harris’ manner, as he pressed his hand upon her cold, damp brow, and swept back her long spiral curls. Then, with a quick, excited glance at her firmly closed eyes, he gave rapid orders for a burial case, such as they always carried with them, to be brought up, that her body might be placed in it and carried to Italy. As he raised the inanimate form in his arms, and laid her head upon a cushion of velvet and eider-down, a paper floated out from the heavy folds of her dress, and rested on the stones at his feet. He took it up; it was a few verses of poetry, traced in the delicate Italian penmanship of Arabel’s own
hand. Tears sprang to the almost girlish eyes of the boy, Carl, as he saw them.
“She was like a sister to you, was she not, Carl?” Harris said, kindly, laying his hand upon the boy’s head. A deep sigh was his only answer, and the boy turned away. Then drawing a richly-chased knife from a wrought case by his side, he lifted one of the long ringlets from her dress, and turned a beseeching look upon Harris. “You may have it, Carl,” he answered to the boy’s look; and the bright, polished steel glanced in among the waving hair, until only the gold tipped haft was visible.
“What will you do with that, signor?” Carl said, pointing to the paper. Harris glanced over it, and then read aloud:
“Bury me not by the water’s edge, Away in my dear old home, Nor in the shade of the pure white cliff, Where the screaming sea-gulls come.
But away, away, on the high hill’s brow, Where the dark trees darker wave, Ye have found for me a stranger home,— O, give me a stranger grave!”
“I have no one but you to advise me, Carl; now tell me what to do,” Harris said.
Carl looked out at the glowing western sky, and said: “She will be better pleased if we will comply with her last request; we will bury her here.”
Harris only smiled at the boy’s reply and he went on: “Will you give her to the cold earth decked so showily? That brilliant, silken, flattering dress, and those richly-gleaming pearls, are too earthly for death’s bridal, are they not?”
“It makes very little difference what the poor frail body wears, Carl,” Harris answered, mournfully. “We will bury her as she is.”
He did not stop to count the cost of the dress she wore. There were plenty more of the same kind in the cases. Then he placed her in the delicately-wrought coffin, only unclasping a single bracelet from her rigid arm, to be kept as a remembrance of that dark day
After that the men saw, or imagined, that Harris grew more stern and changeless in his work, and more thoughtful in his life, than before. One night, when they were preparing to leave, he said, “The suspicion of the colony is aroused; we must keep it up.” Then taking a slip of paper from his portmanteau, he wrote an order upon it and read it aloud. It was for a certain amount of handcuffs, hatchets and chains, to be left at a specified place in the wood, where a quantity of silver, to their full value, would be found in their stead.
“Which of you will lay this beside the central forge in the foundery tonight?” he asked, carelessly.
The men drew back, and an involuntary shudder appeared to pass from one to the other. Is was the first time such a subject had been broached. Force had never been used with them, and they apparently dreaded the thought of it.
“Stand up, my brave men,” said Harris, bitterly; “let me see how many cowards our crew numbers.”
Instantly, as though struck by an electric shock, the eight powerful men rose to their feet, and eight strong right hands grasped the swordhilts by their sides.
Carl’s dark blue eyes looked trustfully into his commander’s face, and he said, “Signor, the Madonna looks at you from the bright skies; think you she would not mourn to hear you call the men, that have served you so long and well, cowards?”
“True, Carl; I was angry and unreasonable. Your girlish manliness makes me ashamed of myself,” answered Harris; “but I do not like to give up the idea of frightening the colonists. They saw our little sailer last night and yester morn, and will be on the lookout for her again. Here, Roland, I know you are not afraid; take the order, and, to reward you for going, I promise that the manacles shall never be used on you.”
Then three cheers for little Carl rung out upon the air, and he lifted the velvet cap from his dark flowing hair, and bowed low to acknowledge the compliment.
Soon after this, Harris returned to Italy, and Don Jose became commander of a clipper of his own, Carl accompanying him. After Harris had arranged his affairs in Italy, so that they no longer needed his presence, he entirely abandoned the idea of a home on the firm land, and roamed about wherever fancy dictated or news called him. Upon going to their hiding-place in Wales, at one time, he saw a girl, habited in the common dress of Welsh peasants, half sitting, half kneeling, by the roadside, making wreathes and bouquets from a collection of flowers beside her, and placing them in a basket on fresh green leaves.
“Buy flowers, sir? buy flowers?” she asked, as he came up.
“Yes,” was the reply, “take all you have; and come with me. I have no way to carry them without your basket,—come.”
“Pay, sir?” she said, looking into his face with a roguish, merry smile, making her black eyes dance, and showing her white even teeth.
Harris laughed, threw a bit of money towards her, and walked on. She gathered up her treasures and followed. They entered the castle, and every man drank to the health of the pretty flower-girl. She drew back, trembling, and tried to run away. Harris stopped her, and led her to a low seat where the sunlight looked in, bidding her go on with her work, and when that was finished he had plenty more for her to do. She laughed and pouted, and at last went to work again.
After that she was often at the castle, and at last she too embarked on the waters, to find a home in the new country. There was a dark rumor afloat, at the time, of force used to make the wild Cathrin go with the pirate band; but it was soon forgotton.
After this there were more regular rules observed; only the seven regular members staying at the Glen and rock, and sometimes only five. Cathrin was given over to Veale, but why it was that she never saw any more of Harris she did not know.
One morning the Arabel shot out of the snug little harbor of Lynn, with all sail set, the whole crew on board, and all their hidden treasures left in the sole care of Cathrin and the magic rattlesnake. But there was trouble brewing Even then one of the king’s cruiser’s was out upon the watch for the little outlandish craft. They were well matched as to sailing, but the Britisher’s broadside soon swept away the fore-topmast of the Arabel. Then she was boarded, a hand-to-hand encounter ensued, and the pirates, instead of being subdued, triumphed, and took the others prisoners. This of course, was a flagrant, never-to-beforgotton offence; but they kept on their way rejoicing, and at last met Harris at Wales.
“Where is the little flower-girl?” he asked, as they sat discussing their business over the flowing wine.
The men looked surprised, and Veale answered, “She is in the cave, your honor.”
“At the cave!” repeated Harris. “Why! was she willing to go?”
“I don’t know—that is—I didn’t ask her,” answered Veale, stammering at the thought of Harris’ displeasure.
“Well,” Harris began, “this is worse than I thought would be laid at our door just yet. You mean, low, detestable, contemptible wretch!” he added, almost fiercely, turning to Veale, “do you know what you have done? actually stolen the only child of fondly-doting parents, and now trying to excuse yourself. I carried my mistress there, did I? But we were married first—married by the rites of a church she loved and revered; besides which, she left neither parents nor friends to mourn for her, and went because she wished to. I will return with you, Veale,” he continued, after a pause, “and bring the birdling back.”
It was long before the Arabel again reached America, and when, at dead of night, the pirates landed and made their way to the Glen, they were unnoticed, for the colonists had grown weary with watching, and given up in despair.
“Will you go home with me, Katy?” Harris said kindly, the next morning, as they reached the rock and commenced partaking of the provisions which the nimble fingers set before them.
Tears came to her dancing black eyes, and she answered, firmly, “I am afraid to go, sir. Can you not bring my mother here?”
Harris smiled, as he asked, “How old are you, Cathrin?”
“Eighteen summers and nineteen winters, sir,” she replied, looking at him from under her long lashes.
“Indeed!” said Harris, in surprise; “you look less than that.”
A frightened, half-angry look passed her face, as she heard from the furthest end of the cave the heavy voice of Veale swearing at one of the men.
“You are not used to profanity, poor child!” he continued, but she did not reply.
Soon after that another scene came up. Veale had been drinking hard all day, and at night was fairly intoxicated. As Cathrin came into the cave, her head crowned with evergreen, and her hands full of flowers, she heard the merry, musical laugh, which she well knew came from none but Harris, immediately followed by a volley of oaths, such as she seldom heard.
“I can drink wine and not suffer for it in that style,” he said, “and why cannot you? Come, get up, now, or by the powers, I will run you through—do you hear?” and he brandished his glittering sword in true buccaneer style.
Veale was lying upon the floor of the cave, apparently not too insensible to carry on the joke. Cathrin shrunk trembling away, and commenced clearing the tea-table. Her presence did not act as a controlling influence, as Arabel’s had. The men are willing to do anything in reason for the merry girl, however, and the life she led at the cave was not altogether intolerable.
Months passed, and a little stranger opened his eyes and claimed protection.
“Who will be thy mother, darling?” Cathrin said, pleasantly, for she thought she would soon be a spirit. But things were differently ordered. It was not long before she was out again, at night-fall, watching for the arrivals.
And now again pictures, darker and more gloomy, arise before our parti-colored glass.
It was early one bright, autumn morn that Cathrin was kneeling by the spring, splashing the cool water over the flowers she had gathered, to keep them fresh, when she heard a low, stifled, wailing cry from the beautiful couch, where she had left the child. When she reached it, Veale was walking slowly down the mountain path, and the babe lay gasping for breath in the sunlight. All the long day did Cathrin chafe the marble brow and tiny hands of the insensible child, and at night, when the men returned, she was still holding it in her arms. Harris looked pityingly upon her, and she laid the little form beside him on the silken couch. But the bright-eyed stranger’s life had fled. Cathrin was childless.
Again we leave them for a short time, but their crime is not forgotten. They are watched constantly. At last three of them were out at sea, the remaining four were traced to the Glen, and there were taken. Before they reached the vessel that was to convey them to England one escaped. Of course it was the daring Veale, who spurned law and order, and defied pursuit. Harris had been in Italy some time then, and had, therefore, no means of knowing what was going on. Veale fled to the rock, but he was not pursued again. Cathrin lost her merry, life-loving heart and pined in solitude. Veale used to light signal fires upon rocks to wreck vessels along the coast, and only when she saw him lighting his dark lantern, and preparing his flaming pine knots, could she be won from her silent mournfulness. Then she would talk hours in her thrilling childish way, and sing to him until her clear voice filled every part of the cavern, and woke the echoes among the gray old rocks; for she dreaded the idea of feeling that her very life was in the keeping of one who would so heedlessly destroy others.
“You will not light the treacherous coys this fearful stormy eve?” she said, pleadingly. “O, I will sing you all the legends of my Welsh home, and all the songs Roland has taught me, if you will not go now.”
Sometimes she would prevail, and he would sit by the heavy chest that served them for a table, and laugh at the brilliant fairy tales she wove from her memories of the dear old home in Wales.
But Cathrin was dying. Day by day her strength was wasting itself away, her cheek grew paler and thinner, and now a hectic flush burned in lieu of her former health. Her eyes grew dull and expressionless, and, at last, she died, her last song just echoing its burden of victory, and her last glance fixed upon the blue sky and the gorgeous sunset.
Veale mourned for her as deeply as it was in his power to mourn for any one, but he dared not bury her; he lived in constant fear that he, or rather the treasures there, would be molested; so he raised her in his strong arms and bore her to the inner room of the cave, then gently laid her on the shelving rocks, flung the soft folds of her India muslin over her pale face and staring black eyes, and went out from the cave alone, a sterner and more merciless man.
All this time Wallace had been more or less interested in the pirates and their work. His noble black horse was often urged over the uneven road by Harris or himself; but now he took himself away and denied all further knowledge of the procedure. Veale’s provisions were exhausted. He dared not take the glittering golden coins to exchange for bread, so he obtained some cheap work, and determined, for the sake of occupying his mind, to earn his own food. How long he lived thus, we do not care to tell, but he gave up his business as wrecker, now that Wallace refused to assist him, and delivered him half the profits of their eight months treachery.
Now we have told the history of Dungeon Rock up to the year one thousand six hundred and fifty-eight, at which time the mortal pilgrimage of Veale was unceremoniously ended by a terrible earthquake, which closed the ancient entrance to the cavern, and thus shut him off from light and life with his dearly-loved treasure, and the superstition-guarded charm and rattlesnake.
From this time forth Dungeon Rock loses its interest and only a weird-like fascination hanging round it prevented its being entirely forgotten. It was years before anything more was done there, until, about forty years ago, a man residing in the town adjoining the one where the rock stands became impressed, or, as he styled it, dreamed, that, by going to a certain place in Dungeon Pasture, he could discover treasures formerly buried by the pirates. He went, as directed,
exhumed the treasure, and the probability is, had he been left to follow his own impressions, would have used it to open the rock.
As it was, his nearest relatives took the matter up, hushed the stories that were getting afloat about the money, accused the man of insanity, and took the trash into their own hands. This seemed to have an undue effect upon the mind of the man, whose name was Brown.
He had always been singularly nervous and impressible. When young he could commit a lesson almost at a glance, and recite it with perfect accuracy. As he grew older, he became morbid and sensitive; would sit for hours talking or singing, his face lighted up with a strange smile, which, when he was aroused from his half trance, would pass away, and he become cross and peevish as before.
After finding the money in Dungeon Pasture, he dwelt more upon such things than before, and often expressed a determination to run away,—a threat which he afterward put into execution, finding there was no way for him to recover his rightful property. He wandered away down east, where he spent several years, and occasionally told his strange story It was by that that he was again discovered and brought back to his home, where, by bribes and threats, he was induced to leave off telling the story. He never could be induced to work; for he constantly averred that he had enough to make him independent, and, if they would let him alone, he knew where he could find plenty more. He has always been supported, however, by those who were said to have the management of what he found; and, upon the death of his last near relative, a half brother, he was placed in the Ipswich asylum for incurable insane people, where he will probably remain until his death.
The next movement of consequence was years afterward, when the city of Lynn was said to have footed the bills for any quantity of ammunition, to be used for the purpose of making a grand attack upon the obstinate rock, and forcing it to give up its trust. It proved a failure, and the city never paid the bills either; but, many a quiet night after that, sober, respectable men laughed at each other about their fast-day blow Their object was to fill the principal crevices with powder, and have them explode in such a manner as would shatter the rock into a
