Towards the Great Peace - Ralph Adams Cram
Every ill thing reveals through its very quality the defects of the
individual man, and as upon him must rest the responsibilities for the
fault, so on him must be placed the responsibility for the recovery. The
failures we have recorded, the false gods we have raised up in idolatry,
even the Great War itself, are revelations of failure in personal and
individual character. We may recognize this, but recognition is not
enough. We may found societies and committees and write books and
deliver lectures, but corporate action is not enough, nor intellectual
assent. There is but one way that is right, sufficient and effective,
and that is the right living of each individual, which is the
incarnation and operation of faith by the grace of God.
It is my desire to close this course of lectures not with my own words
but with those of one of the great personalities revealed by the war.
First, however, I wish to say this. If there is any thought or word in
what I have said that seems to you true, then I ask you to use it not as
a matter for discussion but as an impulse toward personal action. If
there is anything that is of the nature of explicit error, then I pray
that the Spirit of Truth may make deaf your ears that you hear not, and
blot out of your memory the record of what I have said. If there is
anything that is not consonant with the Christian religion, as this has
been revealed to the world and as it is guarded and interpreted by the
Church to which these powers were committed, then I retract and disavow
it explicitly and _ex animo._
There are two great spiritual figures that have been revealed to us
through the Great War: Cardinal Mercier, the great confessor, who held
aloft the standard of spiritual glory through the war itself, and Bishop
Nicholai of Serbia who has testified to eternal truth and righteousness
in the wilderness the war has brought to pass. It is with his inspired
words that I will make an ending of the things I have been impelled to
say.
"Christ is merciful, but at last He comes as the Judge. * * * He comes
now not to preside in the churches only but to be in your homes, in your
shops, to be everywhere with you. He wants to be first; He has become
last in Europe, * * * Civilization passes like the winds, but the soul
remains. Christianization is the only good and constructive
civilization. Americanization without Christianization means Bolshevism.
Europe is suffering today for her sins. Christ has forgiven seventy
times seven, and now it seems that He is the Judge, turning away,
rejected, leaving Europe and going through the gate of Serbia to Asia.
Pray for us. * * * Send us not your gold and silver for food so much as
send us converted men. Convert your politicians, your members of the
press, your journalists, to preach Christ.
"Christ is choosing the perfect stones, the marble of all the churches,
to complete His mystical body in Heaven. He thinks only of one Church,
made from those true to Him of all the churches here. Civilizations are
moving pictures, made by man. Without God they perish. The soul, the
spirit, lives. The war is not against externals; the war is against
ourselves."
APPENDIX A
From the point attained in the lecture on "A Working Philosophy," a
point I believe to be clearly indicated by Christian philosophy and
sharply differentiated from that of paganism or modernism, I would
adventure further and even into a field of pure theory where I can
adduce no support or justification from any other source. Speculation
along this line may be dangerous, even unjustifiable; certainly it
introduces the peril of an attempt to intellectualize what cannot be
apprehended by the intellectual faculty, an effort which has been the
obsession of modernism and has resulted in spiritual catastrophe. On the
other hand we are confronted by a definite and plausible system worked
out by those who were without fear of these consequences, and while this
already is losing something of its common acceptance, it is still
operative, indeed is the only working system and consistent theory of
the majority of thinking men outside the limits of Catholicism. I think
it wrong both in its assumptions and its inferences, and it certainly
played a deplorable part in the building up of the latest phase of
modern civilization, while its persistence is, I am persuaded, a barrier
to recovery or advance. This theory, which has gradually been deduced
from the wonderful investigations, tabulations and inferences of Darwin,
Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer and others of the great group of British
intellectuals and scientists of the nineteenth century, is known under
the general title of Evolution.
The following suggestions are offered with extreme diffidence, and only
as uncertain and indeterminate approximations. In some respects they
seem not inconsistent with the most recent scientific research which
already is casting so much doubt on many of the assumed factors behind
evolution and on the accepted methods of its operation. The true
solution, if it is found, will result from the cooperation of
scientists, philosophers and theologians, illuminated by the fire of the
Divine Wisdom--Hagia Sophia--for in such a problem as this, almost the
final secret of the Cosmos, no single human agency acting alone can hope
to achieve the final revelation, while all acting together could hardly
escape falling into "the falsehoods of their own imaginings" if they
relied solely on their unaided efforts in the intellectual sphere.
Assuming then that life is an enduring process of the redemption of
matter through the interpenetration of spirit, what is a possible method
of action? To explain what I mean I must use a diagrammatic figure, but
I admit this must be not only inadequate but misleading, for instead of
the two dimensions of a diagram, we must postulate three, with time
added as a vital element, and, I dare say, a "fourth dimension" as well.
Confessing inadequacy in the symbol, let us conceive of a space divided
into four strata. The lowest of these is the primary unknowable, the
region of pure spirit, pure spirit itself, the creative energy of the
universe, the unconditioned Absolute, in the terms of Christian
theology, Almighty God. The second is the plane of matter, an area of
potential, but in itself inert and indeterminate. The third is the space
of what we call life in all its forms, the area in which the
transformation and redemption take place. The fourth is the ultimate
unknowable, that is to say, that which follows on after life and
receives the finished product of redemption.
[Illustration: DIAGRAM NO. 1. The interpenetration of Matter by Spirit.
_x,_ The primary Unknowable; _x',_ the ultimate Unknowable; _[Greek:
alpha],_ the plane of Matter; _[Greek: beta],_ the plane of Life.]
Now there is eternally in process a penetration of the stratum of matter
by jets of the _elan vital_ from the realm of pure spirit, each as it
were striving to detach from the plane of matter some small portion,
which is transformed in its passage through life and achieves entrance
into the ultimate unknowable, when the process of redemption is, for
this small particle, completed. Always, however, is exerted the
gravitational pull of matter, and the energy that drove through, instead
of pursuing a right line, tends to bend in a parabolic curve, like the
trajectory of a cannon ball. In the completion of the process some
portion of redeemed matter "gets by," so to speak, but other portions do
not; they return to their source of origin and are reabsorbed in matter,
becoming subject to the operation of future interpenetrating jets of
spiritual energy. The upward drive of the _elan vital_ constitutes what
may properly be known as evolution, the declining fall the process of
devolution or degeneration. Evolution then is only one part of the
cosmic process, it is inseparable from degeneration.
This process holds in the case of individuals, of families, of races, of
states and of eras, or definite and completed periods of time. As man is
begotten, born, developed to maturity and then is brought downward to
the grave, so in the case of races and nations and the clearly defined
epochs into which the history of man divides itself. There is no
mechanical system of "progress," no cumulative wisdom and power that in
the end will inevitably lead to earthly perfection and triumph. For
every individual there is the possibility of spiritual evolution within
the time allotted that will open for him the gates that bar the
frontiers of the world of reality and of redemption that lies beyond
that world of earthly life which is the field of contest between
unredeemed matter and redeeming spirit, of contest and of victory--or of
failure. In the case of races and nations and epochs there is the same
conflict between material factors and spiritual energy; the same
crescent youth with all its primal vitality, maturity with its assurance
and competence, and the dying fall of dissipating energies. In each case
death is the concomitant of life but there is always something that
lasts over, and that is the spiritual achievement, the precious residuum
that remains, defying death and dissolution, that infuses the plane of
life with its redemptive ardour, and is the heritage of lives that come
after, acting with the sacramental agencies of religion in cooeperation
with God Who ordained and compassed them both, in that great process of
redemption and salvation that is continually taking place and will
continue until matter, and time which is but the ratio of the resistance
of matter to the redeeming power of spirit, shall be no more.
I confess the hopelessly mechanical quality in this vain attempt to put
into words something that by its very nature must transcend all modes of
expression that are intellectually apprehendable. Taken literally it
would be entirely false and probably heretical from a theological point
of view, as it certainly is more than inadequate as a philosophical
proposition. It is intended only as a symbol, and a gross symbol at
that, but as such I will let it stand.
Now if there is indeed a possible truth hidden somewhere within somewhat
clumsy approximations, it must modify some of our generally accepted
ideas. The life-process will appear, not a slow, interrupted, but
substantially forward development from lower and simpler organisms to
higher and more complex, with the end (if there be an end), beyond the
very limits of eternity, but rather a swift creation of some of the
highest forms through the first energy of the creative force, with the
throwing off of ever lower and lower forms as the curve of the
trajectory descends. So through a mass of low and static vitality comes
the sudden and enormous power that produces at the very beginnings of
our own recorded history of man, the almost superhuman intelligence and
capacity of the Greeks and the Egyptians. So each of the definite eras
of civilization opens with the releasing of great energies, the
revealing of great figures of paramount character and force. So,
conversely, as the energy declines, men appear less and less potent and
in a descending scale. This is the case with the Greek states, with the
Roman Republic and the Empire, with Byzantium, with
Mediaevalism, and with our modern era. I do not know of any other theory
that claims to explain the perpetual and rhythmical fluctuations of
history, as violent in their degree as they are approximately regular in
their rhythm.
Following the idea a little further, it may even appear that many of the
lower, and particularly the more distorted, forms of animal life,
instead of being abortive or undeveloped stages in a continuous
evolutionary progress, are actually the product of a diminishing energy,
stages in a process of degeneration, and therefore leading not upward to
ever higher stages of development having issue at last in a completed
perfection, but rather downward to ultimate extinction. Geology records
this process in sufficient quantity, so far as many members of the
animal kingdom are concerned, and we, in our own day, have seen the
extinction of the dodo as well as the threatened disappearance of other
species. Creeping and crawling creatures too, that we could crush with
the heel, are but the last and puny descendants of mighty and terrible
monsters that once rolled and crashed through the fetid forests of the
carboniferous era. So there are races of men today, amongst others the
pygmies of Africa and the Australian bushmen, as well as some nearer in
a certain degree to the dominant races of the world, whom large-hearted
optimists regard as stages of retarded development, capable, under
tutelage, of advance to a level with the Caucasian, but who, in this
view of the case, would be but the weakening product of the "dying fall"
of the energy that produced the Greek, the Semite and the Nordic stocks.
So in the last instance, the ape and the lemur and all their derivatives
may be, not records of some of the many stages through which man has
passed in his process of evolution, sidetracked by the upward rush of
one highly favoured or fortunate line, nor yet an abortive branch from
the common trunk from which sprang both man and ape, but rather the last
degradation of a primaeval energy, producing in its declension these
strange caricatures of the Man in whose production it found its
achievement. In other words, the old evolutionary idea is exactly
reversed, and those phenomena once looked on as passed stages of growth,
become the memorials of a creative process that has already achieved,
and is now returning, with its fantastic manifestations in terms of
declining life, even to that primordial mystery whence it had emerged.
Granting this theory, the search for the "missing link," whether in the
geological strata below those that revealed the Piltdown skull, or in
the fastnesses of Central Asia, is as vain a quest as it has always
been. Primaeval man, as he is grudgingly revealed to us, may have been
the degenerate remainder of an earlier and fully developed race whose
records are buried in the sunken fastnesses of some vanished Atlantis or
Lemuria, as the races of the South Sea Islands may be less metamorphosed
remnants of the same stock. Into this infinitely degraded residuum of a
vanished race entered the new energizing force when the divine creative
energy came once more into operation, in the fullness of time, and the
Minoan, the Egyptian and the Greek came almost in an hour to their
highest perfection. So through the unnumbered ages of the world's
history, God has from time to time created man in His own image, out of
the dust of the earth, and man so made "a little lower than the angels"
has, also in time, fallen and forfeited his inheritance. Yet the process
goes on without ceasing, and in conformity with some law of divine
periodicity; but it is _Man_ that is created in the beginning, of his
full stature, even as is symbolically recorded in the Book of Genesis;
not a hairy quadrumana that by the operation of the laws of natural
selection and the survival of the fittest, ultimately and through
endless ages, and by the most infinitesimal changes, becomes at last
Plato and Caesar, Leonardo and Dante, St. Louis and Shakespeare and St.
Francis.
Now in this process of the interpenetration of matter by spirit there
must be a certain periodicity, if it is a constant process and not one
accomplished once and for all time in the very beginnings of the world.
This rhythmical action, which is exemplified by every phenomenon of
nature, the vibratory process of light, sound, heat, electricity, the
pulsation of the heart, the motion of the tides, has never escaped the
observation even of primitive peoples, and always attempts have been
made to determine its periodicity. May it not be infinitely complex, as
the ripple rises on the wave that lifts on the swell of the underlying
tide? Certainly we are now being forced back to a new consideration of
this periodical beat, in history at least, for now that our own era,
which came in by the power of the Renaissance and the Reformation and
received its final energizing force through the revolutions of the
eighteenth century and the industrial revolution of the nineteenth, is
so manifestly coming to its end, we look backward for precedents for
this unexpected debacle and lo, they appear every five hundred years
back as far as history records. 500 B.C., Anno Domini; 500 A.D., 1000
A.D., and 1500 A.D. are all, to the point of very clear approximation,
nodal points, where the curve of the preceding five centuries, having
achieved its crest, curves downward, and in its fall meets the curve of
rising energy that is to condition the ensuing era. The next nodal
point, calculated on this basis, comes about the year 2000. Are we not
justified, in plotting our trajectory of modernism, in placing the crest
in the year 1914, and in tracing the line of fall from that moment?
I have plotted this curve, or series of curves, after a rough and ready
fashion (Diagram No. 2) and though the personal equation must, in any
subjective proposition such as this, enter largely into account, I think
the diagram will be accepted in principle if not in details, and not
wholly in its relationships. I have made no effort to estimate or
indicate comparative heights and depths, giving to each five-hundred
year epoch a similar level of rise and depth of fall. Perhaps the actual
difference here would, rightly estimated, be less than we have been led
to believe, though certainly few would lift the Carolingian crest to the
level of that of Hellenism or of the Middle Ages, nor assign to the end
of this latter period as low a fall as that accomplished during the
tenth century in continental Europe.
[Illustration: DIAGRAM No. 2. The rise and fall of the line of
civilization; showing also the nodal points at the Christian Era and at
the years 500, 1000, 1500 and 2000 (?)]
In a third cut (Diagram No. 3) I have roughly indicated in conventional
form a phenomenon which seems to me to show itself around the nodal
point when a descending curve of energy meets and crosses the descending
line. As the _elan vital_ that has made and characterized any period
declines, it throws off reactions, the object of which is if possible to
arrest, or at least delay, the fatal _glissade._ These are, in intent
and in fact, reforms; conscious efforts at saving a desperate situation
by regenerative methods. Trace back their lines of procedure, and in
every case they will be found to issue out of the very force which is
even then in process of degeneration, therefore they are poisoned at the
source and no true or vital reforms, for the sudden energy that urges
them is, after all, in no respect different from that which is already a
failing force.
[Illustration: DIAGRAM No. 3. The reactions thrown off by (a) the
descending line of vital force, (b) by the ascending line.]
This, I conceive, is why today the multitudinous and specious "reforms,"
which beat upon us from all sides, and find such ready acceptance in the
enactments of law, are really no reforms at all, since each one of them
is but an exaggeration or distortion of the very principles and methods
that already are bending downward the curve of our progression until it
disappears in the nether-world of failure, as did those of every
preceding epoch of equal duration. An example of what I mean is the
astute saying, frequently heard nowadays: "The cure for democracy is
more democracy."
Now while one curve descends and throws off its reformative reactions in
the process, the other is ascending, preparatory to determining the
coming era for its allotted space of five centuries. In this process it
also throws off its own reactions, but these are for the purpose of
lifting the line more rapidly, bringing its force into play before its
determined time. These also are exaggerations, over-emphasized qualities
that are inherent in the ascending force, and they are no more to be
accepted as authoritative than are the others. They have their value
however, for they are prophetic, and even in their exaggeration there is
the clear forecast of things to be. Trace them in turn to the source.
What is their source? The new power issues out of obscurity and its
character is veiled, but we can estimate it from the very nature of the
exaggerated reactions we _can_ see. If something shows itself, in
sociology, economics, politics, religion, art, what you will, that is
especially a denial of what has been a controlling agency during the
past four or five hundred years: if it is by common consent impractical
and "outside the current of manifest evolutionary development," then,
shorn of its exaggerations, reduced to its essential quality, it is very
probably a clear showing forth of what is about to come to birth and
condition human life for the next five hundred years. This, I suppose,
explains the comprehensive return to Medievalism that, to the scorn of
biologists, sociologists and professors of political economy, is
flaunting itself before us today, at the hands of a very small minority,
in all the categories I have named, as well as in many others besides.
A glance at the diagram will show a curious pattern round about the
nodal point. One may say that the reactions are somewhat mixed. Quite
so. At this moment we are beaten upon by numberless reforms, both
"radical" and "reactionary." Materialism, democracy, rationalism,
anarchy contending against Medievalism of twenty sorts, and strange
mysticisms out of the East. Which shall we choose, _if_ we choose, and
do not content ourselves with an easier inertia that allows nature to
take its course? It is simply the question; On which wave will you ride;
that which is descending to oblivion or that which has within itself the
power and potency to control man's destiny for the next five hundred
years?
APPENDIX B
CERTAIN BOOKS SUGGESTED FOR COLLATERAL READING
ADAMS, HENRY Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres.
ADAMS, HENRY Degradation of the Democratic Dogma.
BAUDRILLART, A. Catholic Church, Renaissance and Protestantism.
BELL, BERNARD IDDINGS Right and Wrong after the War.
BELLOC, HILAIRE The Servile State.
BRYCE, VISCOUNT Modern Democracies.
BULL, PAUL B. The Sacramental Principle.
CHESTERTON, G.K. Orthodoxy.
CHESTERTON, G.K. What's Wrong with the World.
CHESTERTON, G.K. The Napoleon of Notting Hill.
CONKLIN, E.G. The Direction of Human Evolution.
CRAM, R.A. The Nemesis of Mediocrity.
CRAM, R.A. Walled Towns.
CRAM, R.A. The Ministry of Art.
CRAM, R.A. The Great Thousand Years.
FAGUET, E. The Cult of Incompetence.
FERRERO, G. Europe's Fateful Hour.
FIGGIS, J.N. Civilization at the Cross Roads.
FIGGIS, J.N. The Will to Freedom.
FIGGIS, J.N. Political Aspects of St. Augustine's "City of God."
GENUNG, J.F. The Life Indeed.
GRAHAM, STEPHEN Priest of the Ideal.
HARRISON, McVEIGH Daily Meditations.
HUBBARD, A.J. The Fate of Empires.
IRELAND, ALLEYNE Democracy and the Human Equation.
LeBON, G. The World in Revolt.
MEIKLEJOHN, ALEXANDER The Liberal College.
MORRIS, WILLIAM The Dream of John Ball.
PECK, W.G. From Chaos to Catholicism.
PENTY, A.J. Old Worlds for New.
PENTY, A.J. The Restoration of the Guild System.
PHILLIPPS, L. MARCH Form and Colour.
PHILLIPPS, L. MARCH Europe Unbound.
PORTER, A. KINGSLEY Beyond Architecture.
POWELL, F.C. A Person's Religion.
RAUPERT, G. Human Destiny and the New Psychology.
SHIELDS, THOMAS E. The Philosophy of Education.
TAWNEY, R.H. The Acquisitive Society.
WALSH, JAMES J. The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries.
WALSH, JAMES J. Education, How Old the New.
WORRINGER, W. Form Problems of the Gothic.
DeWULF, M. History of Mediaeval Philosophy.