Towards the Great Peace - Ralph Adams Cram
The Incarnation and the Redemption are not accomplished facts, completed
nineteen centuries ago; they are processes that still continue, and
their term is fixed only by the total regeneration and perfecting of
matter, while the Seven Sacraments are the chiefest amongst an infinity
of sacramental processes which are the agencies of this eternal
transfiguration.
God the Son became Incarnate, not only to accomplish the redemption of
men as yet unborn, for endless ages, through the Sacrifice of Calvary,
but also to initiate and forever maintain a new method whereby this
result was to be more perfectly attained; that is to say, the Church,
working through the specific sacramental agencies He had ordained, or
was from time to time to ordain, through His everlasting presence in the
Church He had brought into being at Pentecost. He did not come to
establish in material form a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, or to provide
for its ultimate coming. He indeed established a Spiritual Kingdom, His
Church, "in the world, not of it," which is a very different matter
indeed, as the centuries have proved. His Kingdom is not of this world,
nor will it be established here. There has been no _absolute_ advance in
human development since the Incarnation. Nations rise and fall, epochs
wax and wane, civilizations grow out of savagery, crest and sink back
into savagery and oblivion. Redemption is for the individual, not for
the race, nor yet for society as a whole. Then, and only then, and under
that form, it is sure, however long may be the period of its
accomplishment. "Time is the ratio of the resistance of matter to the
interpenetration of spirit," and by this resistance is the duration of
time determined. When it shall have been wholly overcome then "time
shall be no more."
See therefore how perfect is the correspondence between the Sacraments
and the method of life where they are the agents, and which they
symbolically set forth. There is in each case the material form and the
spiritual substance, or energy. Water, chrism, oil, the spoken word, the
touch of hands, the sign of the cross, and finally and supremely the
bread and wine of the Holy Eucharist. Each a material thing, but each
representing, signifying and containing some gift of the Holy Spirit,
real, absolute and potent. So matter and spirit are linked together in
every operation of the Church, from the cradle to the grave, and man has
ever before him the eternal revelation of this linked union of matter
and spirit in his life, the eternal teaching of the honour of the
material thing through its agency and through its existence as the
subject for redemption. So also, through the material association, and
the divine condescension to his earthly and fallible estate (limited by
association with matter only to inadequate presentation) he makes the
Spirit of God his own, to dwell therewith after the fashion of man.
And how much this explains and justifies: Man approaches, and must
always approach, spiritual things not only through material forms but by
means of material agencies. The highest and most beautiful things, those
where the spirit seems to achieve its loftiest reaches, are frequently
associated with the grossest and most unspiritual forms, yet the very
splendour of the spiritual verity redeems and glorifies the material
agency, while on the other hand the homeliness, and even animal quality,
of the material thing, brings to man, with a poignancy and an appeal
that are incalculable, the spiritual thing that, in its absolute
essence, would be so far beyond his ken and his experience and his
powers of assimilation that it would be inoperative.
This is the true Humanism; not the fictitious and hollow thing that was
the offspring of neo-paganism and took to itself a title to which it had
no claim. Held tacitly or consciously by the men of the Middle Ages,
from the immortal philosopher to the immortal but nameless craftsman, it
was the force that built up the noble social structure of the time and
poised man himself in a sure equilibrium. Already it had of necessity
developed the whole scheme of religious ceremonial and given art a new
content and direction through its new service. By analogy and
association all material things that could be so used were employed as
figures and symbols, as well as agencies, through the Sacraments, and
after a fashion that struck home to the soul through the organs of
sense. Music, vestments, incense, flowers, poetry, dramatic action, were
linked with the major arts of architecture, painting and sculpture, and
all became not only ministers to the emotional faculties but direct
appeals to the intellect through their function as poignant symbols. So
art received its soul, and was almost a living creature until matter and
spirit were again divorced in the death that severed them during the
Reformation. Thereafter religion had entered upon a period of slow
desiccation and sterilization wherever the symbol was cast away with the
Sacraments and the faith and the philosophy that had made it live. The
bitter hostility to the art and the liturgies and the ceremonial of the
Catholic faith is due far less to ignorance of the meaning and function
of art and to an inherited jealousy of its quality and its power, than
it is to the conscious and determined rejection of the essential
philosophy of Christianity, which is sacramentalism.
The whole system was of an almost sublime perfection and simplicity, and
the formal Sacraments were both its goal and its type. If they had been
of the same value and identical in nature they would have failed of
perfect exposition, in the sense in which they were types and symbols.
They were not this, for while six of the explicit seven were
substantially of one mode, there was one where the conditions that held
elsewhere were transcended, and where, in addition to the two functions
it was instituted to perform it gave, through its similitude, the clear
revelation of the most significant and poignant fact in the vast mystery
of life. I mean, of course, the Holy Eucharist, commonly called the
Mass.
If matter is _per se_ forever inert, unchangeable, indestructible, then
we fall into the dilemma of a materialistic monism on the one hand,
Manichaean dualism on the other. Even under the most spiritual
interpretation we could offer--that, shall we say, of those today who
try to run with the hare of religion and hunt with the hounds of
rationalistic materialism--matter and spirit unite in man as body and
soul, and in the Sacraments as the vehicle and the essence, but
temporally and temporarily; doomed always to ultimate severance by death
in the one case, by the completion of the sacramental process in the
other. If, on the other hand, the object of the universe and of time is
the constant redemption and transformation of matter through its
interpenetration by spirit in the power of God the Holy Ghost, then we
escape the falsities of dualism, while in the miracle of the Mass we
find the type and the showing forth of the constant process of life
whereby every instant, matter itself is being changed and glorified and
transferred from the plane of matter to the plane of spirit.
If this is so: if the Incarnation and the Redemption are not only
fundamental facts but also types and symbols of the divine process
forever going on here on earth, then, while the other Sacraments are in
themselves not only instruments of grace but manifestations of that
process whereby in all things matter is used as the vehicle of spirit,
the Mass, transcending them all, is not only Communion, not only a
Sacrifice acceptable before God, it is also the unique symbol of the
redemption and transformation of matter; since, of all the Sacraments,
it is the only one where the very physical qualities of the material
vehicle are transformed, and while the accidents alone remain, the
substance, finite and perishable, becomes, in an instant of time and by
the operation of God, infinite and immortal.
It is to sacramentalism then that we must return, not only in religion
and its practice, but in philosophy, if we are to establish a firm
foundation for that newer society and civilization that are to help us
to achieve the "Great Peace." Antecedent systems failed, and subsequent
systems have failed; in this alone, the philosophy of Christianity, is
there safety, for it alone is consonant with the revealed will of God.
III
THE SOCIAL ORGANISM
Society, that is to say, the association in life of men, women and
children, is the fundamental fact of life, and this is so whether the
association is of the family, the school, the community, industry or
government. Everything else is simply a series of forms, arrangements
and devices by which society works, either for good or ill. Man makes or
mars himself in and through society. He is responsible for his own soul,
but if he sees only this and works directly for his soul's salvation,
disregarding the society of which he is a part, he may lose it, whereas,
if he is faithful to society and honourably plays his part as a social
animal with a soul, he will very probably save it, even though he may
for the time have quite ignored its existence. Man is a member of a
family, a pupil under education, a worker and a citizen. In all these
relationships he is a part of a social group; he is also a component
part of the human race and linked in some measure to every other member
thereof whether living or dead. Into every organization or institution
in which he is involved during his lifetime--family, school, art or
craft, trade union, state, church--enters the social equation. If
society is ill organized either in theory or in practice, in any or all
of its manifestations, then the engines or devices by which it operates
will be impotent for good. Defective society cannot produce either a
good fundamental law, a good philosophy, a good art, or any other thing.
Conversely, these, when brought forth under an wholesome society, will
decay and perish when society degenerates.
In its large estate, that is, comprehending all the minor groups, as a
nation, a people or an era, society is always in a state of unstable
equilibrium, tending either toward better or worse. It may indeed be of
the very essence of human life, but it is a plant of tender growth and
needs delicate nurture and jealous care; a small thing may work it
irreparable injury. It may reach very great heights of perfection and
spread over a continent, as during the European Middle Ages; it may sink
to low depths with an equal dominion, as in the second dark ages of the
nineteenth century. Sometimes little enclaves of high value hide
themselves in the midst of degradation, as Venice and Ireland in the
Dark Ages. Always, by the grace of God, the primary social unit, the
family may, and frequently does, achieve and maintain both purity and
beauty when the world without riots in ruin and profligacy.
I have taken the problem of the organization of society as the first to
be considered, for it is fundamental. If society is of the wrong shape
it does not matter in the least how intelligent and admirable may be the
devices we construct for the operation of government or industry or
education; they may be masterly products of human intelligence but they
will not work, whereas on the other hand a sane, wholesome and decent
society can so interpret and administer clumsy and defective instruments
that they will function to admiration. A perfect society would need no
such engines at all, but a perfect society implies perfect individuals,
and I think we are now persuaded that a society of this nature is a
purely academic proposition both now and in the calculable future. What
we have to do is to take mankind as it is; made up of infinitely varied
personalities ranging from the idiot to the "super-man"; cruel and
compassionate, covetous and self-sacrificing, silly and erudite, cynical
and emotional, vulgar and cultured, brutal and fastidious, shameful in
their degradation and splendid in their honour and chivalry, and by the
franchise of liberty and the binding of law, facilitate in every way the
process whereby they themselves work out their own salvation. You cannot
impose morality by statute or guarantee either character or intelligence
by the perfection of the machine. Every institution, good or bad, is the
result of growth from many human impulses, not the creation of
autocratic fiat. But growth may be impeded, hastened, or suspended, and
the most that can be done is to offer incentives to action, remove the
obstacles to development, and establish conditions and influences that
make more easy the finding of the right way.
Now it seems to me that the two greatest obstacles to the development of
a right society have been first, the enormous scale in which everything
of late has been cast, and second, that element in modern democracy
which denies essential differences in human character, capacity and
potential, and so logically prohibits social distinctions, and refuses
them formal sanction or their recognition through conferred honours. In
questioning the validity and the value of these two factors, imperialism
and social democracy, and in suggesting substitutes, I am, I suppose,
attacking precisely the two institutions which are today--or at all
events have been until very recently--held in most conspicuous honour by
the majority of people, but the question is at least debateable, and for
my own part I have no alternative but to assert their mistaken nature,
and to offer the best I can in the way of substitutes.
The question of imperialism, of a gross and unhuman and therefore
absolutely wrong scale, is one that will enter into almost all of the
matters with which I propose to deal, certainly with industrialism, with
politics, with education, with religion, as well as with the immediate
problem of the social organism, for not only has it destroyed the human
scale in human life, and therefore brought it into the danger of
immediate destruction, but it has also been a factor in establishing the
quantitative standard in all things, in place of the qualitative
standard, and this, in itself, is simply the antecedent of well-merited
catastrophe. In considering the social organism, therefore, we must have
in mind that this is intimately affected by every organic institution
which man has developed and into which he enters in common with others
of his kind.
The situation as it confronts us today is one in which man by his very
energy and the stimulus of those cosmic energies he has so astonishingly
mastered, has got far beyond his depth. I say man has mastered these
energies; yes, but this was true only of a brief period in the immediate
past. They now have mastered him. It is the old story of the
Frankenstein monster over again. Man is not omnipotent, he is not God.
There are limits beyond which he cannot go without coming in peril of
death. An isolated individual here and there may become super-man,
perhaps, though at grievous peril to his own soul, and it is conceivable
that to such an one it might be possible to live beyond the human scale,
though hardly. If one could envisage so awful a thing as a community
made up entirely of super-men, one might concede that here also the
human scale might be exceeded without danger of catastrophe. With
society as it is, and always will be, a welter of defectives and
geniuses in small numbers and a vast majority of just plain men, with
all that that implies, the breaking through into the imperial scale is
simply a letting in the jungle; walls and palings and stockades, the
delicate fabrics of architecture, the clever institutions of law, the
thin red line of the army, all melt, crumble, are overcome by the onrush
of primordial things, and where once was the white man's city is now the
eternal jungle, and the vines and thrusting roots and rank herbage blot
out the very memory of a futile civilization, while the monkey and the
jackal and the python come again into their heritage.
Alexander and Caesar, Charles V and Louis XIV and Napoleon and Disraeli
and William III could function for a few brief years beyond the limits
of the human scale, though even they had an end, but you cannot link
imperialism and democracy without the certainty of an earlier and a more
ignominious fall.
I have already spoken of the malignant and pathological quality of the
quantitative standard. It is indeed not only the nemesis of culture but
even of civilization itself. Out of this same gross scale of things come
many other evils; great states subsisting on the subjugation and
exploitation of small and alien peoples; great cities which when they
exceed more than 100,000 in population are a menace, when they exceed
1,000,000 are a crime; division of labour and specialization which
degrade men to the level of machines; concentration and segregation of
industries, the factory system, high finance and international finance,
capitalism, trades-unionism and the International, standardized
education, "metropolitan" newspapers, pragmatic philosophy, and churches
"run on business methods" and recruited by advertising and "publicity
agents."
Greater than all, however, is the social poison that effects society
with pernicious anaemia through cutting man off from his natural social
group and making of him an undistinguishable particle in a sliding
stream of grain. Man belongs to his family, his neighbourhood, his local
trade or craft guild and to his parish church: the essence of wholesome
association is that a man should work with, through and by those whom he
knows personally--and preferably so well that he calls them all by their
first names.
As a matter of fact, today he works with, through and by the individuals
whom he probably has never seen, and frequently would, as a matter of
personal taste, hesitate to recognize if he did see them. He belongs to
the "local" of a union which is a part of a labour organization which
covers the entire United States and is controlled in all essential
matters from a point from one hundred to two thousand miles away. He
votes for mayor with a group of men, less than one per cent of whom he
knows personally (unless he is a professional politician), with another
group for state officers, and with the whole voting population of the
United States, for President. If he goes to church in a city he finds
himself amongst people drawn from every ward and outlying district, if
he mixes in "society" he associates with those from everywhere, perhaps,
except his own neighbourhood. Only when he is in college, in his club or
in his secret society lodge or the quarters of his ward boss does he
find himself in intimate social relations with human beings of like mind
and a similar social status. He is a cog in a wheel, a thing, a point of
potential, a lonely and numerical unit, instead of a gregarious human
animal rejoicing in his friends and companions, and working, playing and
quarreling with them, as God made him and meant him to be and to do.
Of course the result of this is that men are forced into unnatural
associations, many of which are purely artificial and all of which are
unsound. It is true that the trade union, the professional society, the
club are natural and wholesome expressions of common and intimate
interests, but they acquire a false value when they are not balanced and
regulated by a prior and more compelling association which cuts, not
vertically but horizontally through society, that is to say, the
neighbourhood or community group. The harsh and perilous division into
classes and castes which is now universal, with its development of
"class consciousness," is the direct and inevitable result of this
imperial scale in life which has annihilated the social unit of human
scale and brought in the gigantic aggregations of peoples, money,
manufacture and labourers, where man can no longer function either as a
human unit or an essential factor in a workable society.
It is hard to see just how we are to re-fashion this impossible society
in terms even nearly approaching the normal and the human. It is
universal, and it is accepted by everyone as very splendid and quite the
greatest achievement of man. It is practically impossible for any one
today to conceive of a world where great empires, populous cities, mills
and factories and iron-works in their thousands, and employing their
millions through their billions of capitalization, where the stock
exchange and the great banking houses and the insurance companies and
the department stores, the nation-wide trade unions and professional
associations and educational foundations and religious corporations, do
not play their predominant part. Nevertheless they are an aggregation of
false values, their influence is anti-social, and their inherent
weakness was so obviously revealed through the War and the Peace that it
has generally escaped notice.
There seem but two ways in which the true scale of life can be restored;
either these institutions will continue, growing greater and more
unwieldy with increasing speed until they burst in anarchy and chaos,
and after ruin and long rest we begin all over again (as once before
after the bursting of Roman imperialism), or we shall repeat history (as
we always do) only after another fashion and, learning as we always can
from the annals of monasticism, build our small communities of the right
shape and scale in the very midst of the imperial states themselves, so
becoming perhaps the leavening of the lump. This of course is what the
monasteries of St. Benedict did in the sixth century and those of the
Cluniacs and the Cistercians in the eleventh, and it is what the
Franciscans and Dominicans tried to do in the fourteenth century, and
failed because the fall of the cultural and historic wave had already
begun.
The trouble today with nearly all schemes of reform and regeneration is
that they are infected with the very imperialism in scale that has
produced the conditions they would redeem. Socialism is now as
completely materialistic as the old capitalism, and as international in
its scope and methods. Anarchy is becoming imperial and magnificent in
its operations. Secular reformers must organize vast committees with
intricate ramifications and elaborate systems supported by "drives" for
money which must run into at least seven figures, and by vast and
efficient bureaus for propaganda, before they can begin operations, and
then the chief reliance for success is frequently placed on legislation
enacted by the highest lawmaking bodies in the land. Even religion has
now surrendered to the same obsession of magnitude and efficiency, and
nothing goes (or tries to, it doesn't always succeed) unless it is
conceived in gigantic "nation-wide" terms and is "put across" by
efficiency experts, highly paid organizers, elaborate "teams" of
propagandists and solicitors, and plenty of impressive advertising. A
good deal can be bought this way, but it will not "stay bought," for no
reform of any sort can be established after any such fashion, since
reform begins in and with the individual, and if it succeeds at all it
will be by the cumulative process.
I shall speak of this element of scale in every succeeding lecture, for
it vitiates every institution we have. Here, where I am dealing with
society in itself, I can only say that I believe the sane and wholesome
society of the future will eliminate great cities and great corporations
of every sort. It will reverse the whole system of specialization and
the segregation and unification of industries and the division of
labour. It will build upward from the primary unit of the family,
through the neighbourhood, to the small, and closely knit, and
self-supporting community, and so to the state and the final unifying
force which links together a federation of states. In general it will be
a return in principle, though not in form, to the social organization of
a Mediaeval Europe before the extinction of feudalism on the Continent,
and the suppression of the monasteries and the enclosure of the common
lands in England.
The grave perils of this false scale in human society have been
recognized by many individuals ever since the thing itself became
operative, and every Utopia conceived by man during the last two
centuries, whether it was theoretical or actually put into ephemeral
practice, has been couched in terms of revolt away from imperialism and
towards the unit of human scale. In every case however, the introduction
of some form of communism has been the ruin of those projects actually
materialized, for this in itself is imperialistic in its nature.
Communism implies the standard of the gross aggregate, the denial of
human differentiation and the quantitative standard, as well as the
elimination of private property and the negation of sacred
individuality. Its institution implies an almost immediate descent into
anarchy with a sequent dictatorship and autocracy, for it is the
reversal of the foundation laws of life. Such reversals cannot last,
nothing can last that is inimical to flourishing life; it may triumph
for a day but life itself sloughs it off as a sound body rids itself of
some foreign substance through the sore that festers, bursts and, the
septic conditions done away with, heals itself and returns to normal.