Gram­mar – it has much to teach us. Tak­ing a les­son from it, exam­ine your life from three angles: by the adverbi­al of cause, of man­ner and of pur­pose. That is, seek the cause of your exist­ence, exam­ine the right man­ner of liv­ing, and identi­fy the pur­pose of your life: for what reas­on, in what way and to what end?

For what reas­on? Let us not sup­pose that the cause of birth was chance, that one came as an unex­pec­ted, unwanted child, accep­ted out of neces­sity. This stig­mat­ises a man for life and can cripple his human rela­tion­ships, unless he rouses him­self to identi­fy at last not with his trau­mat­ised past but with his prom­ising future. Com­plain­ing turns even a pos­sible heav­en into a cer­tain hell. If the ran­dom­ness of indi­vidu­al life is a bur­den on a man's shoulders, then the sup­pos­i­tion of a ran­dom earthly life is a bur­den on the shoulders of man­kind. If exist­ence springs from chance, then we might also say that it arose from noth­ing. And if it arose from noth­ing, then to noth­ing it would also return. So let us not regard the cause of exist­ence as a cos­mic acci­dent.

The reli­gious world view often presents earthly exist­ence as a vale of tears, life as mere suf­fer­ing, bod­ily birth as a fall. On this basis we might even regard the cause of our exist­ence as a diabol­ic­al dis­or­i­ent­a­tion, a smirk of Satan, but per­haps it is bet­ter, after all, to dis­cov­er, even in an earthly exist­ence lim­ited and shot through with much misery, a qual­ity that points bey­ond itself, the pos­sib­il­ity of learn­ing and growth, and the work of provid­ence. On this basis life seems rather a divine arrange­ment, and this is a far more sat­is­fy­ing explan­a­tion than any other. If a spir­itu­al cause of exist­ence can be accep­ted, then exist­ence, as an effect, shares in mini­ature the nature of its own cause. That is why it is said that the ori­gin of life can be noth­ing other than Life, the ori­gin of con­scious­ness Con­scious­ness, and the ori­gin of joy Bliss. Thus man's exist­ence and the being of exist­ence itself can be traced back to this liv­ing ulti­mate cause.

In what way? Tol­stoy said that the ques­tion is not why one must live – for that is a given, a fact – but how one must live. By his very birth man comes into the world in debt: he is indebted to his par­ents and his fam­ily, but more widely to liv­ing beings in gen­er­al, to teach­ers, to the ancest­ors of man­kind, to nature and ulti­mately to God. Life is hon­our­able when man repays these debts with ser­vice, is of bene­fit to oth­ers, and is a self-sac­ri­fi­cing, use­ful and cooper­at­ive par­ti­cipant in the great order of the world. As a human being, man must lead more than a bio­lo­gic­al exist­ence, for he is not merely a creature of instinct. On a high­er level stands a life lived by the moral vir­tues, and becom­ing a good man is a noble task. But to grow into all the pos­sib­il­it­ies of human exist­ence, to answer even the highest call­ings – that is already a spir­itu­al hori­zon. Life must be lived in the pull of this sub­lime call­ing, or else everything only drags it down. A man is known by his ideals: bio­lo­gic­al exist­ence is a basic given, moral exist­ence a ser­i­ous eth­ic­al achieve­ment, and spir­itu­al exist­ence the most authen­t­ic mode of con­duct.

To what end? Life is a reflec­tion, and the high or low, sac­red or pro­fane ideals of life are reflec­ted in deeds and in ways of think­ing. We might think that the thor­oughly mater­i­al­ist thes­is that being determ­ines con­scious­ness is gone for good, but the old idea keeps try­ing to creep back in ever new guises. In intel­lec­tu­al circles it is self-evid­ent that con­scious­ness determ­ines being, and though a phe­nomen­on can be derived from its causes, it can also be explained by its pur­pose, its call­ing. So if human exist­ence is a reflec­tion, what is it a reflec­tion of? What do we repeat again and again: the fatal mis­take, or the etern­al search? No, it is not death that is the pur­pose of life; it is not for the sake of passing away that we were born on Earth. We must, of course, come to exper­i­ence tran­si­ence, but it is pre­cisely this that points to etern­ity. The ori­gin of life is Being, the ori­gin of know­ledge is Con­scious­ness, the ori­gin of joy is Bliss, and man's call­ing is to find his way back into etern­ity. Per­son­al ful­fil­ment and the ful­fil­ment of the mir­acle of exist­ence go hand in hand.