81. Personal Relevance of Truth (Thomas S. Brown; 1955)
Prayer of Samuel Johnson: O LORD, my Maker and Protector, who hast graciously sent me into this world, to work out my own salvation, enable me to drive from me all such unquiet and perplexing thoughts as may mislead or hinder me in the practice of those duties which thou hast required. When I behold the works of thy hands and consider the course of thy providence, give me Grace always to remember that thy thoughts are not my thoughts, nor thy ways my ways.
And while it shall please Thee to continue me in this world where much is to be done and little to be known, teach me by thy Holy Spirit to withdraw my mind from unprofitable and dangerous inquiries, from difficulties vainly curious, and doubts impossible to be solved. Let me rejoice in the light which thou hast imparted, let me serve thee with active zeal, and humble confidence, and wait with patient expectation for the time in which the soul which Thou receivest, shall be satisfied with knowledge. Grant this, O Lord, for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.
We live in a twilight zone between the total darkness of pure chance & the light of truth. . . “The Other” is not only our feeling of awe and relatedness, but also a sense of the incompleteness and the inadequacy of our efforts . . . We are suddenly faced with the fact that rejection of Truth means also the denial of any real difference between life and death, & that our living is therefore [all] . . . Emptiness, Meaninglessness, Nothingness. . .
[Quote from Milton]: “A man may be a heretic in the Truth; and if he believes things only because his Pastor says so, or the Assembly so deter- mines, without knowing any other reason, though his belief be true, the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.” . . . [Holding] that the search itself . . . is the good life [and] . . . the finding of truth is irrelevant . . . results in the loss of responsibility to the Truth.
In my own search for the Truth . . . [there] came a release from the belief that Truth had to be “certain,” logical, self-evident, & publicly demonstra- ble. . . Unimpassioned detachment on matters of death or life . . . is nonsense and immoral. . . Truth is Reality appearing in time and space; it is Reality right perceived and communicated among men. . . Truth and Reality are one, and there can be no life, no existence without Truth. . . [Quote from Socrates]: “I would rather die, having spoken after my fashion, than speak in your manner and live... The difficulty, my friends is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness, for that runs faster than death.” How long is our beloved country to survive? She can be destroyed by inner untruth far more swiftly than by any other force.
How can one explain the Unity of Truth in terms common to sci- ence, philosophy, & religion? Justin Martyr . . . found a universal philosophy in Christianity; it was for him . . . the all-embracing Truth about the meaning of existence. . . [Christians] are simply granted an insight into Reality. . . All those who have lived according to the Truth are Christians. . . Christianity is not right & others wrong; . . . it is the all-inclusive interpretation of Reality, the universal philosophy.
As the Creative Self-Expression of God, Logos has kinship with all the universe. . . Because of our kinship with the Logos, whose creations we are, deep, valid religious experience is possible; through the Logos, we communi- cate with God. . . [What sets Christianity apart is that] the Logos, God's Self- Expression, the Creative Poser that brought this Universe into being, became . . . fully human. . . This revelation of Reality in human, concrete, historical terms is the basis of Christianity. There can't be any Truth in [any religion] or science, philosophy, or mysticism, which can't be received by Christianity.
How shall I detect the true signals in all the noise & motion around me? . . . I respond to [the signals] in my life because I have had a previous & meaningful relationship with the signaler. . . I do have a previous relationship with Truth. Since I am the creature of God, I can never escape relationship with God. God became what we are, that we might become as God is . . . clearly & with directness. Jesus promised that he would . . . be with us always. His guiding spirit of Truth reveals to us here and now the inner intent of the Scripture . . . [Through] the leading of his Spirit . . . there is the clearer per- ception of Truth and of its meaning for us in this age.
Why is it that I don't see the Truth in every situation with infallible clarity? In the simplest terms, the cause of my error is missing key signals. . . [Or] it may be that I behave as though a signal was given when there really was none; or I may want not to hear the signal. Indeed, there is no knowledge [or acknowledgement] of the Truth where there's no commitment which results in significant action. We are discovered by Truth, and are given the power by the Truth to light our souls; we can know and be known by the Truth.
Suffering remains as a recurring crisis out of which new life can spring, if the suffering is comprehended in the Light of Truth. . . Suffering is that pecu- liar environment in which God's love and power can shine most clearly. We all live in the promise that we shall know the Truth & the Truth shall make us free.
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82. Religion and Mental Illness (by Carol R. Murphy; 1955)
About the Author—Carol Murphy is a writer on religious philosophy & pastoral psychology; she came to Pendle Hill as a religious philosophy student. She studied pastoral counseling at: Garrett Biblical Institute, MA Gen. Hospital, & Worcester State Hospital. This is her 3rd PHP pamphlet; she writes other articles in her field.
[Introduction]—Behind stone walls & barred windows of the mental hospital, you hear the shouts & cursing of those living in private worlds of mental confusion. [You go inside the locked ward, & receive] greetings from individuals with real personalities, pathetically eager for companionship, & you feel great compassion. There are 3 stages of feelings hospital workers have toward mental patients: initial shock of meeting uncontrolled & occasionally violent inhabitants; self-protective frivolity & indifference; awareness of each patient's fears & hungers. Of what concern is the mentally ill's world to the sane & secure? The Society of Friends has long tried to bring religion's redemptive power, with its peace & love testimony, to the mentally ill.
["We differ only in degree"]—One who digs down to common huma- nity underlying us all sees that the mentally ill's troubles differ only in degree from "normal" troubles. Whereas the "normal's" symptoms and defenses are small, the psychotic's symptoms are conspicuous & disabling; the psychotic's soul is bare and vulnerable, a captive to one's past. Most of us have our blind spots. The psychotic denies frightening reality and lives a world of fantasy. A sense of kinship rather than of distance is a necessity in understanding the psychotic mind.
A healthy person has a healthy ego, a controlling, rational function, which needs few inner defenses & attacks problems constructively, [working] like a secure and democratic government. A neurotic person has a repressive, defensive, rigid ego, something like a repressive dictatorship. The psychotic person has such a weak ego that untamed impulses & childish thinking terro- rize or overwhelm one, something like a country in revolt, with armed mobs & disrupted communications. All of us, like governments at war, tend to adopt censoring, hopeful lies, rationalizing, scapegoats, and tend to succumb to a strong man when native resources fail.
Another avenue of understanding psychosis is a person's perception of & attitude toward ones feelings. A person with a failure in self-awareness may feel deeply threatened by others' appraisals of one, when one is unable to estimate oneself. The psychotic has lost the sense of ones own boundaries. One may disown one's feelings as alien invaders injected into ones mind by enemies.
To the schizophrenic psychotic everyone is father & mother, & one repeats with them the love & hate which began as a child in ones unsatisfac- tory child / parent relationship. [Figures of speech about the body take on lite- ral meaning for the psychotic]. Delusions about appearance can really sym- bolize self-disgust. [They don't develop beyond the childhood thinking pro- cess] with its private meanings & fantasies; [they never fully connect] with concepts having a meaning common to other minds.
In the schizophrenic, thinking becomes isolated from feeling, one thought becomes disconnected; logical coherence is lost. The mentally ill have lost their wholeness; in the end they find it hard to even become individuals. [Wholeness with others and individuality are 2 basic spiritual needs]. Alienation may be seen in the loss of control over self, confusion of thought, loss of con- tact with reality, and mingling love and hate in personal relationships. What causes such illness?
We must never forget the person as a whole in a search for a parti- cular "cause." Mental illness often arises from the failure of the first and most formative relationship of parent and child. The mental patient may never have learned to love or be loved during the founding of their personality. [First, let us consider a patient with paranoid ideas of persecution & seek a compas- sionate understanding of her].
"An Enemy Hath Done This"—Mary Brown enjoyed some simple country pleasures; what left deeper impressions was the drudgery of work, & her father's critical illness. She married a much older man to get away from home, & complained of ill health, some of it genuine, some not. She began to claim that certain people were trying to inject diseases into her. After several mental hospital admissions, she has since become unable to adjust to living outside. Our ability to learn from life lies in a sphere of "feedback" between encounter with reality & our perception of reality. Learning can lead to a vicious circle of self-limitation or to a self-correcting transformation by renew- al of the mind.
Mary felt left out of the circle of family affection. If hard work didn't get her attention or affection, she herself could be nursed, like her father was. But when the family became impatient, she crawled out of bed to return to work. Marriage was a frustration that only increased loneliness & hostility. Ones own hostility frightens a paranoid, & you might say that one denies awareness of it in ones self, & projects it upon others, or ones own reactions appear to one as poisonous injections or insidious diseases. One then rationalizes this interpre- tation into a delusional system by means of a closed-circle thinking, [where past conclusions shape interpretations so they prove the same conclusions]; this system doesn't allow for the creative inconsistency of new discovery.
A paranoid's false certainty builds a false reality that grows farther & farther away from common agreement with others; [it becomes harder & harder to maintain]. Theological systems & Freudian psycho-analytical systems are in danger of becoming delusional [as well as dogmatic]. Healthy thinking is open-ended, ready to balance differences between past & present situations, seeing new perceptions as challenges rather than a paranoid's catastrophic threat. [Probably] her feelings of hostility rose to the point where she had to disown them; they appeared as plots against her & cancer injections. We now have the picture of an older woman, living in a private hell where she loves no one, no one loves her, or wants to live with her. [So she winds up in a mental hospital].
The Relevance of Religion—What is religion's answer to inner, pri- vate hells? The Mrs. Browns in the hospital receive some satisfaction for their claims for dependency and protection, but the atmosphere is necessarily impersonal. How can religion help convey to a patient a deep respect & a love which can pierce below the unlovable, demanding neediness to the true need for love? As psychiatry sees the root of mental illness in failure of love, so religion, with agape love as the structure of the universe, must join with psychotherapy in supplying remedial love; healing religion supports sane thin- king with a sense of transcendence.
Religion must help the isolated mind out of its closed squirrel-cage of thought. Religion is a search for an absolute, an uncaptured & transcendence truth which breaks open our human system and make them all seem relative. A growing religion has creative tension with the transcendent, & reaches for the ever more inclusive truth, "that perpetual conversation ... a continuous inner self-estrangement and conflict, which is the very breath and joy of the religious life" [von Hügel]. It can embrace joy and suffering unafraid. A sane religion must find reconciliation in the heart of tragedy; it must bear both the Cross and the Crown.
["Salvation of Sick Minds and Souls"]—Religion must bring salvation. The salvation of sick minds & souls comes through an experience of relation- ship that is symbolic of man's relationship with the Ground of being. One ac- cepts oneself as accepted by God, & grows toward [a loosely defined, ever- expanding goal]. The minister of this sacramental relationship is being Christ to one's neighbor. How do rituals, theologies, & church activities help Mrs. Brown in her bitter loneliness? The Lord's Supper's proverbial non- verbal symbolism can be used to convey the divine love to those who can't be reached by words. Theological language that offers Christ & not just Christo- logy can be used.
The power of love means the ability to perform the work of love in trans- forming soul & society. Acting on principle means finding the working principle of things. We must learn to understand & cooperate with the workings of God. Religious psychotherapy & pastoral care is the study of how to apply the power of loving and understanding relationship. We must be controlled by the power we channel.
The Healing Relationship—What are the signs and effects of the healing relationships? It relies on understanding rather than judging, partici- pation rather than withdrawal, and a thinking with rather than for or about one. The eye of love sees behind the behavior to the heart of the person, seeing all that he thinks and does in the light of ones own individual whole, judging one by the secret identity that God has prepared for one. The therapist loves in the name of Jesus, who remains the symbol of God's love even after humanity did its worst. [People] are put in a special category of the "insane" so that society may take a different attitude toward them.
The Christian, who sees that all have their measure of both destiny and freedom, is not interested in blame or excuses. "It wasn't that this man sinned, or his parents, but that God's works might be made manifest in him" [John 9.3]. It is particularly important in dealing with paranoid patients to sympathize with their feelings while being skeptical of their reasoning. It is hard thus to stand half in and half out of someone's mental outlook.
[The pamphlet provides a patient / counselor dialog, where the patient expresses feelings of abandonment and anxiety, and accusations of mental torture, medical and procedural neglect (some most likely untrue), and the counselor responds with reflective listening and sympathetic, yet somehow noncommittal answers]. The therapist must somehow stay clear of the patient's paranoid thinking without arguing, judging, or making an absolute of one's own system of thought. Both must venture forth into the larger truth together. God as truth must give a frame of reference larger than that of either the counselor or patient, by which both are measured.
[Realizing Ones Sickness]—To make the patient relinquish one's false world, one must realize ones own sickness. [While the state hospital seems ugly, confined, & unsympathetic to patient & counselor], it must be remembered that mental patients, like the rest of us, blame [outside] circumstances for what is really an internal state of suffering, inward isolation & emotional confinement. When [hospital] patients know enough to be dissatisfied with their own inner condition, there is hope they can change, & even leave. [They must develop] the ability to face & endure the pervasive, formless anxiety the symptoms tried to relieve, & to find a better way of life.
Like all great teachers of the spirit, Socrates urged the supreme impor- tance of soul-therapy. His argument strategy was to clear his pupils' minds of unexamined opinions so that truth could enter; a state of aporia or helpless- ness, [a realization of ignorance], and a craving to know is the precondition of new insight. Deep transformation comes from something more than bewilder- ment; there must be a recognition of psychological and spiritual perplexity. Jesus' harvest was among sinners, those rejected by Jewish society to which they normally belonged, and who might be willing to abandon their old outlook and life—and be born again.
The mental patient then, must recognize his poverty of spirit. How can the patient admit illness if mental illness is seen as a threatening judg- ment or the stigma of disease? How can the counselor acknowledge ones own distance from the Truth, or one's unconscious feeling that mental illness is shameful? [Hopefully, with] the therapist's acceptance, the patient begins to see one's mental symptoms as a series of defenses which can be dropped as one's isolation is overcome.
The therapist has to work with a patient's ego, which is both friend and enemy to healing; it both seeks reality and erects stubborn defenses against realizations that threaten the self's integrity. Often the therapist has to supply the psychotic person with self-control and a sense of reality, by bringing an over-excited or fantasying patient back to everyday fact. [Deeper and deeper] therapeutic relationship should be able to strengthen them; toward this end religion and therapy must work together.
One of the clinical training movement's pioneers was Anton Boisen, a minister who became mentally ill himself, and from that realized the religious significance of mental crises. His training program includes direct contact with patients supplemented by lectures. The religious counselor collaborates with each of the other professional groups, each of whom performs their comple- mentary function, & knows when to ask the others' help. The religious coun- selor has the opportunity to see a person in the ultimate context of ones relationship with God, bring that relationship to one, and to be sensitive to the need for more skilled help if it should arise.
The Ultimate Reward—The mentally ill show us in large the blind alley defenses, confusion, alienation from self, society and God from which we all suffer in some measure. We discover our own weakness and also the under- lying structure of relationship which can use us as its binding and healing agents. This work is ... the world's reconciliation to God as Truth by God as Love. In contact with the mentally ill we can learn the sensitive serenity, disci- plined compassion which are essential to the work. With their stripes we are healed.
83. The Use of Silence (by Geoffrey Hoyland; 1955)
[About the Author and Pamphlet]—Geoffrey Hoyland (1889-1965) believes that the Sanctuary of Silence's gateway lies open to every man and woman. He also wrote hymns that were found in various Protestant Hymnals.
The really significant rejections of [sensory input] of the adult are those he makes because he distrusts his senses. Jesus told his adult hearers that . . . they must grow beyond the phases of doubt and re-enter the phase of acceptance. It is inevitable that Christians should distrust religion, [which] is a product of sensory experience. Can the Christian become aware of God in the same [sense-free way that the Christian is aware of self-hood? Once the senses have unlocked the door and Someone has come in, the senses are forgotten.
[In] Professor William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, he isn't interested in the various keys of creed, dogma, or ritual which unlocked the door. . . [but] with the inner experience. In its essence it is neither words nor emotion nor action; it is pure silence. Nothing in James’ conclusions conflicts with Jesus’ teachings.
How many Christian can say that inward spiritual communion is the core of their religious experience? Is God's vision reserved for a favored few? The words of Jesus and Paul do not suggest a rare and fleeting experience to be granted only to a chosen few. We cannot receive God while we are talking to God... We have to achieve a silence of mind & of spirit which is something quite different from the mere absence of noise. [We must have faith] that God is waiting for us [as we turn inwards]. . . There must be [humi- lity], no thought of either sin or holiness in ourselves when we approach the Living Silence.
The man and woman who dares to go into the silence to meet with God must possess something of a quality of [enthusiastic] abandon along with faith and humility. . . Communion with God in the deeps of the soul doesn't remove all conflict from life; in many ways it increases the strain. The outer life of sense & action must be changed to conform with the new relationship within. Com- munion with God in the Living Silence isn't a substitute for “active” prayer & meditation, rather it is their crown.
This individual Christian's living communion with God . . . has always presented the Church with a well-nigh insoluble problem. It is impossible to deny to most of these heretics some measure of inspiration, [which contra- dicted orthodox teaching]. This perplexing dilemma has made the Church sus- picious of her mystics. You can't enter into communion with God on the basis of [restrictions as to how God may approach you].
[Freedom & humility is necessary in our approach to God.] This humi- lity must spring from a knowledge of God's ways and of ourselves. [For] God speaks to us by silences and it is often difficult to translate that experience into the words and thoughts of our conscious life. [And] we may surely believe that the prism of a stern, relentless prophet [may have] distorted the “word” that arose in his mind as a result of his communion. In the Living Silence God will give them, not words, but grace. The grace will transform their very natures, recreating them and impressing upon them Christ’s image. One must recog- nize that one’s own imperfect nature may well have distorted & misinterpre- ted God's perfect will. One must not be disobedient to the Heavenly Vision.
The ideal is that the worshipers gather in silence, each offering one’s self to God in uttermost self-abandonment . . . sins and all. They become one soul . . . because God has made them one. [Afterwards] problems . . . have solved themselves even though they have not been consciously thought of during the hour of worship. Does the silent worship of the Friends actually work out in this way, producing these results? They gather in silence . . . but it is [often] not the Living Silence. [To the extent that it is the Living Silence, a meeting is said to be “gathered.”]
First . . . silent prayer or meditation is not the same thing as the “Living Silence.” . . . Second . . . silent communal worship can only spring from a deep and overwhelming conviction that God is there in the profound depths below consciousness. . . Third . . . worship in the Living Silence cannot be combined profitably with “sensory” worship. Isn't it possible that in the Living Silence lies the one perfect road to reunion? [Here] priest and layman, ritualist and Quaker, male & female are indistinguishable when they are all alike held with God's embrace. The Sanctuary of Silence's gateway lies open to every man & woman who will pay the price of entry. Is there any reason in Heaven or Earth why we should not all enter it together?
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84. From Where They Sit (Dorothy H. Hutchinson; 1955)
About the Author—Dorothy Hutchinson is the mother of 3 children. She
received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College & her Ph.D, in Zoology from Yale
University. She is widely known for her writing & lecturing on religious subjects
and on international relations.
received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College & her Ph.D, in Zoology from Yale
University. She is widely known for her writing & lecturing on religious subjects
and on international relations.
[Journey of Friendship]—[After listening to several eminent foreign
diplomats give standard PR speeches], I said I wished I knew what the PEO-
PLE of the their respective countries were thinking. The Abington Friends
Meeting started planning the trip. I was not told until it was well-formulated.
I realized that my words represented my basic personal concern for the
world’s people as the key to the world’s peace.
diplomats give standard PR speeches], I said I wished I knew what the PEO-
PLE of the their respective countries were thinking. The Abington Friends
Meeting started planning the trip. I was not told until it was well-formulated.
I realized that my words represented my basic personal concern for the
world’s people as the key to the world’s peace.
The itinerary was planned [to meet for 2 days each with 16 families around the world on both sides of specific international tensions, and all the major religions]. The purposes of the Journey of Friendships were: to tell the folks visited that there are Americans who are interested in them as people; to learn from them how their problems, personal and national look from where they sit; to show them something they may not have known about the US.
Hazel Du Bois, a brilliant & handsome young Negro girl, just graduated from Philadelphia’s Girls High School, was selected as my partner on this
novel venture. [Youth, attractiveness, intelligence, & sensitivity were valuable
qualifications that she possessed]. It seemed especially important to make our
team interracial. Spending a few days in each home was the Journey's pattern.
qualifications that she possessed]. It seemed especially important to make our
team interracial. Spending a few days in each home was the Journey's pattern.
The basic problems were how to make friends quickly & how to gain the most
understanding in a minimum of time. One factor in our success was my natural
interest in the children. Another contributing factor was my natural feeling of
kinship with housewives & their problems.
Hazel was a phenomenal linguist. She picked up words and phrases
quickly, sang the folksongs from other families, & learned new ones, at least
11, each in a language she hadn’t known before her visit. Abington Meeting’s
members & I did a study in preparation for the Journey, which included valu-
able briefs on the history, economics, politics, foreign relations, religion and
customs of the visited countries. My ability to eat anything also helped. Many
people helped with arrangements. The letter from Abington MM expressing
feelings of brotherhood impressed many of the people we met. This Journey
of Friendship furnished me with no Gallup Poll of world opinion. But men &
women talked to us freely as to friends.
How things look from where they sit: US problems/Their Needs—I
assumed that US problems were a private affair. Questions about McCarthy &
McCarthyism greeted me in all parts of the world. Signs of hysteria in the US
frighten helpless people [when they think of the US & its destructive power].
India watches & analyzes US Congressional elections closely. Arab states see
injustice in the US’s influence in Israel’s creation. Israel is ill-at-ease & resent- ful because of the US policy of arming Arab states against Communist inva- sion. A young Israeli said: “You American must learn that, when the US shifts her weight from one foot to the other, the little people of the world tremble.
understanding in a minimum of time. One factor in our success was my natural
interest in the children. Another contributing factor was my natural feeling of
kinship with housewives & their problems.
Hazel was a phenomenal linguist. She picked up words and phrases
quickly, sang the folksongs from other families, & learned new ones, at least
11, each in a language she hadn’t known before her visit. Abington Meeting’s
members & I did a study in preparation for the Journey, which included valu-
able briefs on the history, economics, politics, foreign relations, religion and
customs of the visited countries. My ability to eat anything also helped. Many
people helped with arrangements. The letter from Abington MM expressing
feelings of brotherhood impressed many of the people we met. This Journey
of Friendship furnished me with no Gallup Poll of world opinion. But men &
women talked to us freely as to friends.
How things look from where they sit: US problems/Their Needs—I
assumed that US problems were a private affair. Questions about McCarthy &
McCarthyism greeted me in all parts of the world. Signs of hysteria in the US
frighten helpless people [when they think of the US & its destructive power].
India watches & analyzes US Congressional elections closely. Arab states see
injustice in the US’s influence in Israel’s creation. Israel is ill-at-ease & resent- ful because of the US policy of arming Arab states against Communist inva- sion. A young Israeli said: “You American must learn that, when the US shifts her weight from one foot to the other, the little people of the world tremble.
Our arming Pakistan against a possible Communist invasion horrified the Indians I met.
We saw the beautiful things our hosts were proud of & the unlovely
sights which our hosts thought we should see. [We saw untreated health pro-
blems] in every age group. The “poverty” of Philadelphia’s poorest sections
paled in comparison to this poverty. The “good life,” in any culture, has little
to do with absolute standards of living. That life is “good” which provides
enough food for one’s family, the comforts which others have in the surroun-
ding society, & better educational & economic possibilities for children than
those their parents had.
Why is the hungry ⅔s of the world’s people now restless & deter- mined to improve their standards of eating, health & education? I believe that uneven modernization has invaded the underdeveloped countries them-
We saw the beautiful things our hosts were proud of & the unlovely
sights which our hosts thought we should see. [We saw untreated health pro-
blems] in every age group. The “poverty” of Philadelphia’s poorest sections
paled in comparison to this poverty. The “good life,” in any culture, has little
to do with absolute standards of living. That life is “good” which provides
enough food for one’s family, the comforts which others have in the surroun-
ding society, & better educational & economic possibilities for children than
those their parents had.
Why is the hungry ⅔s of the world’s people now restless & deter- mined to improve their standards of eating, health & education? I believe that uneven modernization has invaded the underdeveloped countries them-
selves & intolerable contrasts are right before the eyes of the miserable. They
are awakening to the fact that there are now in the world both technical know-
ledge and material resources capable of raising living standards to a decent
level; a static condition of abject misery is no longer necessary and therefore
no longer tolerable.
are awakening to the fact that there are now in the world both technical know-
ledge and material resources capable of raising living standards to a decent
level; a static condition of abject misery is no longer necessary and therefore
no longer tolerable.
In every underdeveloped country, small valiant efforts are being made
by people to correct age-old social evils, as well as ill health, illiteracy and
poverty. I marveled at the incredible optimism of the social workers who face
most discouraging setbacks. The US is seen as generous with help, but the
help is 10 parts arms to 1 part economic aid. [These countries see a need
to build up infrastructure] before they can attract private investment. When
I got home I found that the US [unilaterally cut their $8 million (5 cents
apiece) share of the United Nations Environmental Technical Assistance
Program to 6½ million, about 4 cents apiece]. The unnecessary suffering of
others should fester in our consciences, even if we had no need for allies or
material for either a cold or a hot war.
How Things Look from Where They Sit: The Spread of Commu-
by people to correct age-old social evils, as well as ill health, illiteracy and
poverty. I marveled at the incredible optimism of the social workers who face
most discouraging setbacks. The US is seen as generous with help, but the
help is 10 parts arms to 1 part economic aid. [These countries see a need
to build up infrastructure] before they can attract private investment. When
I got home I found that the US [unilaterally cut their $8 million (5 cents
apiece) share of the United Nations Environmental Technical Assistance
Program to 6½ million, about 4 cents apiece]. The unnecessary suffering of
others should fester in our consciences, even if we had no need for allies or
material for either a cold or a hot war.
How Things Look from Where They Sit: The Spread of Commu-
nism---The material needs of the world are certainly helping Communism to spread. There have been modifications of the capitalist system consciously
aimed at spreading the wealth. In the world at large, poor nations are getting poorer by comparison as the rich nations get richer. Communism has shown
itself capable of delivering benefits which they desperately need. The
methods within their countries have been ruthless, but poor nations told me
methods within their countries have been ruthless, but poor nations told me
they prefer what they call honest ruthlessness for the benefit of the many to
the old corrupt ruthlessness for the benefit of the few.
Because the US seeks to gain allies and materiel for a prospective war,
and offers poor countries just enough aid to insure these results, I am not sur-
prised that we get little gratitude. A high Indian government official assured
me that India could never go Communist no matter how bad her economic
condition “because our Gandhian philosophy is diametrically opposed to that
of the Communists.” Our poverty-ridden brothers in Southeast Asia are
and offers poor countries just enough aid to insure these results, I am not sur-
prised that we get little gratitude. A high Indian government official assured
me that India could never go Communist no matter how bad her economic
condition “because our Gandhian philosophy is diametrically opposed to that
of the Communists.” Our poverty-ridden brothers in Southeast Asia are
asking: Can an economically underdeveloped nation quickly raise its
standard of living without going Communist? A refugee from Communist
Poland said: “Communism is a challenge to Greater Justice. If [the West] can't
produce the Greater Justice, Communism will win.”
A discouraged young Hindu said about refugees: “They will wait
patiently for a while and then they may turn to Communism which is like
a miracle drug; they won't ask too much about the after effects of the miracle
drug.” Many millions of her 365,000,000 are made more prosperous and con-
Poland said: “Communism is a challenge to Greater Justice. If [the West] can't
produce the Greater Justice, Communism will win.”
A discouraged young Hindu said about refugees: “They will wait
patiently for a while and then they may turn to Communism which is like
a miracle drug; they won't ask too much about the after effects of the miracle
drug.” Many millions of her 365,000,000 are made more prosperous and con-
tented; there remain millions unhelped. Communism has spread by means of
desperate and dissatisfied people within each country where it has been been
welcomed. Each nation I visited said: “Our main problem is to quickly raise
living standards so that the real & present misery of our people doesn't invite
Communism.”
With Charity for All, Including the US—Why does the US offer the
world billions for arms and only millions for economic aid, conside-
ring the former a good investment, and the latter a ‘give away’ of dubi-
ous value? Much of the world fears the domestic infiltration of the Commu-
nism ideology and the civil war that might result. Our American fear is of
the USSR as the only other major power in a world where the basic factors
in international relation are power politics and the balance of power.
desperate and dissatisfied people within each country where it has been been
welcomed. Each nation I visited said: “Our main problem is to quickly raise
living standards so that the real & present misery of our people doesn't invite
Communism.”
With Charity for All, Including the US—Why does the US offer the
world billions for arms and only millions for economic aid, conside-
ring the former a good investment, and the latter a ‘give away’ of dubi-
ous value? Much of the world fears the domestic infiltration of the Commu-
nism ideology and the civil war that might result. Our American fear is of
the USSR as the only other major power in a world where the basic factors
in international relation are power politics and the balance of power.
We fear an armed Communist bloc [of nations] which can take over
the world by its military might. In no other country except Turkey did I find
the same kind of fear which we have in the US. An intelligent Turkish woman
said: “We are spending 60% of our national budget on arms but our people
are poor … [they may] begin to play with queer ideas.”
To many anti-Communists [in the places I visited], our approach to
the threat of Communism seems irrelevant or worse than irrelevant. [The US
rose to power quickly & inherited the system where naked power & military
might] is the accepted pattern of national security. We are developing such
the world by its military might. In no other country except Turkey did I find
the same kind of fear which we have in the US. An intelligent Turkish woman
said: “We are spending 60% of our national budget on arms but our people
are poor … [they may] begin to play with queer ideas.”
To many anti-Communists [in the places I visited], our approach to
the threat of Communism seems irrelevant or worse than irrelevant. [The US
rose to power quickly & inherited the system where naked power & military
might] is the accepted pattern of national security. We are developing such
abnormal relations with the rest of the world’s people that whatever we do
looks bad. When we share & stipulate how money shall be used, we seem to
be bribing & dominating them, some of whom are nations newly independent
be bribing & dominating them, some of whom are nations newly independent
from foreign domination.
Our fears are diverting our resources from what the world thinks are
its basic needs. [Our desire to keep France & England as allies, in the world’s
eyes, seems to contradict our honest desire for the colonial people’s freedom].
Our fears are diverting our resources from what the world thinks are
its basic needs. [Our desire to keep France & England as allies, in the world’s
eyes, seems to contradict our honest desire for the colonial people’s freedom].
We arm oppressive, reactionary national governments, not because we wish
to support undemocratic regimes, but to have anti-Communists in power
to support undemocratic regimes, but to have anti-Communists in power
regardless of their vices. We need & want the world’s people as friends, but
we are stuck in a downward spiral of more arms, less economic aid, & worse- ning relations.
The Next Step—The UN’s Economic & Social Council’s study re-
veals that billions of dollars of aid must be put to work where only millions
are now being offered. Pilot projects are undertaken to show what may be
done with adequate funding, rather than providing adequate funding. The US refuses to provide $80 million, 50 cents per capita, to the Special UN Fund
The Next Step—The UN’s Economic & Social Council’s study re-
veals that billions of dollars of aid must be put to work where only millions
are now being offered. Pilot projects are undertaken to show what may be
done with adequate funding, rather than providing adequate funding. The US refuses to provide $80 million, 50 cents per capita, to the Special UN Fund
for Economic Development until savings are achieved through world
disarmament.
To the rest of the world this looks like a poor excuse for not making
the very modest contribution which this Fund requires. Disarmament would
free our response to our brothers’ need from the compulsions of the cold war,
we’d be free to be governed by the moral principles and good will which we
really yearn to have a chance to express. [Harold Stassen is in charge of dis-
armament] He said: “It is my view that cynicism—confirmed, congealed, com
pounded cynicism constitutes one of the most serious handicaps … I promise
disarmament.
To the rest of the world this looks like a poor excuse for not making
the very modest contribution which this Fund requires. Disarmament would
free our response to our brothers’ need from the compulsions of the cold war,
we’d be free to be governed by the moral principles and good will which we
really yearn to have a chance to express. [Harold Stassen is in charge of dis-
armament] He said: “It is my view that cynicism—confirmed, congealed, com
pounded cynicism constitutes one of the most serious handicaps … I promise
a concentrated, consecrated, persistent and prayerful endeavor to penetrate
the problem and move towards solution.”
World disarmament would make an enormously expanded world de-
velopment program necessary in order to keep our people employed [in a
world with far less arms production. There is little to be gained by specula-
ting on the USSR’s motives or strategy in the event that a fair world disarma-
ment and world development program should be offered with US support.
Offering such a proposal would gain the US moral prestige which she now
sadly lacks.
Signs of Hope: The Sense of World Community—Those who dare
not hope argue that differences in world cultures, religions, & particularly
political differences, will prevent concerted world action on world problems
for a long time. Is there evidence of the necessary World Community
already discernible? Human beings have devised means whereby people
show each other respect & friendliness when they meet; all are worshipers.
Students from Asian & African cultures can absorb a western education even
in highly technical subjects. Secluded Muslim & Hindu women are compe-
ting successfully with men as leaders in their countries’ social and political
life. People everywhere are making phenomenal demonstrations of their
basic similarities in nature & capacity.
What about our human weaknesses? Greater similarity exists be-
tween the struggles of India to eliminate discrimination based on cast & our
American struggles to eliminate discrimination based on race. In Thailand,
World disarmament would make an enormously expanded world de-
velopment program necessary in order to keep our people employed [in a
world with far less arms production. There is little to be gained by specula-
ting on the USSR’s motives or strategy in the event that a fair world disarma-
ment and world development program should be offered with US support.
Offering such a proposal would gain the US moral prestige which she now
sadly lacks.
Signs of Hope: The Sense of World Community—Those who dare
not hope argue that differences in world cultures, religions, & particularly
political differences, will prevent concerted world action on world problems
for a long time. Is there evidence of the necessary World Community
already discernible? Human beings have devised means whereby people
show each other respect & friendliness when they meet; all are worshipers.
Students from Asian & African cultures can absorb a western education even
in highly technical subjects. Secluded Muslim & Hindu women are compe-
ting successfully with men as leaders in their countries’ social and political
life. People everywhere are making phenomenal demonstrations of their
basic similarities in nature & capacity.
What about our human weaknesses? Greater similarity exists be-
tween the struggles of India to eliminate discrimination based on cast & our
American struggles to eliminate discrimination based on race. In Thailand,
the Chinese minority is regarded somewhat as the US Jews are. As I sat watch
fully in a foreign movie audience, I sensed the same reaction everywhere to
fully in a foreign movie audience, I sensed the same reaction everywhere to
similar emotional appeals.
Spiritually underdeveloped devotees of every religion are satisfied with
terminology and rituals & find no common ground with groups whose termi-
nology and rituals differ from theirs. The spiritually mature of all religions find
themselves close together in their apprehension of the common humanity and
the common divinity of humankind. The question remains: Do we physically,
Spiritually underdeveloped devotees of every religion are satisfied with
terminology and rituals & find no common ground with groups whose termi-
nology and rituals differ from theirs. The spiritually mature of all religions find
themselves close together in their apprehension of the common humanity and
the common divinity of humankind. The question remains: Do we physically,
culturally & religiously diverse peoples, huddled together in a world now shrunk to the size of a village, have enough sense of world community to take common action on our common economic and security problems?
What the colored patches & boundaries in black lines symbolize is more
What the colored patches & boundaries in black lines symbolize is more
real to many inhabitants of the patches than our common humanity, com-
mon dangers, or common needs. In each country I visited, I found nuclei of
well-informed people, solemnly aware of our common problems, our common
dangers in an atomic age, & our common need for world action on matters vital
to our common welfare and our common survival.
I came home with hope but with a feeling that all of us, nations and
peoples, are trapped. No nation can be expected to take the risk involved in
breaking out of the armament system which is holding us apart and preven-
ting our normal relations with each other. Shall we discover, in time, that
one who but presses on the thin partitions that separate us can push one’s
hand right through. And, on the other side one’s hand finds the hand of some-
one else—where they sit grouping in the dark and afraid to hope.
well-informed people, solemnly aware of our common problems, our common
dangers in an atomic age, & our common need for world action on matters vital
to our common welfare and our common survival.
I came home with hope but with a feeling that all of us, nations and
peoples, are trapped. No nation can be expected to take the risk involved in
breaking out of the armament system which is holding us apart and preven-
ting our normal relations with each other. Shall we discover, in time, that
one who but presses on the thin partitions that separate us can push one’s
hand right through. And, on the other side one’s hand finds the hand of some-
one else—where they sit grouping in the dark and afraid to hope.
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85 The Examined Life (by Carol Murphy; 1955)
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85 The Examined Life (by Carol Murphy; 1955)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR—Carol Murphy is a writer on religious philoso- phy & pastoral psychology. She studied political science at Swarthmore Col- lege & was a student in religious philosophy while at Pendle Hill. She is the author of 3 previous Pendle Hill pamphlets: The Faith of an Ex-Agnostic, The Ministry of Counseling and Religion and Mental Illness.
[Critic on the Hearth: Day 1]—The Critic announced: “I’m going to in- vent a religion without conscience.” [Author]: If you think that’s a new inven- tion, you’re mistaken. [Critic]: I’m willing to agree with Christianity that agape love is the supreme value. But corruption enters in as soon as we call it ‘a morality.’ We then feel we must love, [but] we can't manufacture the real thing at command. Christianity's great mistake has been to try to force us to feel what we cannot be ordered to feel; [love is replaced with fear].
[Critic]: Negativism is the fault of a conscience-ridden religion. Emerson
criticized Quakers because the Inward Light forbade them doing things rather
than leading them to do more. [Author]: The Catholics call it scrupulosity, and
no religious denomination has been free of it. [Critic]: Negativism is the direct
opposite of what a religion full of life & power should be. Must the [religious
purist] always draw apart from others?
[Author]: We are none of us incorruptible and the saint is the one who
[Author]: We are none of us incorruptible and the saint is the one who
knows it and acts or refrains from acting accordingly. [Critic]: Whatever a saint
did or refrained from doing would be done out of love. A saint refrains because
he [chooses] something better to do. Those who believe that wine, cigarettes,
or playing-cards have an inevitably fatal attraction are also denying free will.
There is no security in this world. Everything is both a blessing and a curse, &
it’s entirely up to you which it shall be. [Author]: How could we agree with
Paul that all things are lawful but not all things are expedient?
“What does your belief in love lead you to think of war?” [Critic]: I
“What does your belief in love lead you to think of war?” [Critic]: I
would ask: what would a lover do? The answer is not a simple one. War is
people who hate; war also means soldiers showing more basic love & loyalty
to each other than most people do in peacetime. There are some things I can't
make myself do; I expect that includes military activities. I hope my feeling
toward war is based on the experience of an eternal power. My faith in love is
like engineering, not like an idealism. Idealism is just as bad as fear; idealists
are not peacemakers. They never compromise; their cause is always right.
Idealists have to have a white and a black, and we call ‘principle’ whatever it
is we want to get stubborn about. I think what we both want is reconciliation
rather than compromise.
“Reinhold Niebuhr still sees political power and physical force as ulti-
“Reinhold Niebuhr still sees political power and physical force as ulti-
mate determinants in the world. Yet at the same time he tries to look at the
world with the other half of his mind from the viewpoint of sin & salvation.
God, (Love) gives what-ever power there is to ideals; but more powerful than
ideals are personalities completely mastered by love. It’s up to us to learn to
be grasped by that power and apply it intelligently and successfully.”
“Moralistic idealism is being irrationally rigid & irresponsible, [when
it claims] ‘principle regardless of consequences.’ The end should determine
the choice of the means, for the actual consequences of the means are going
to determine the actual goal achieved. [Author]: You want a religion without
fear or rigid & powerless idealism. What would you substitute for a mora-
listic view? [Critic]: I would substitute the view of the poets and the psychia-
trists, who have to develop an impartial compassion, while moralists are mere-
ly melodramatic; they have a world-view that is too simplified and one-sided.
[I don’t want them to disapprove of Hitler or Stalin as I do], I want them to
understand the Hitlers & Stalins—and the saints too, as well as sinners. We
need to know how & why [we grow up or are stunted the way we are], not
spend our lives in separating the ‘sheep’ from the ‘goats.’
“Prophets make good reading in later eras, when we can look conde-
scendingly at the society they attacked. You can’t change people by putting
them on the defensive, or show men their potentialities by condemning them.
We live by the compassion of the prophets, not by their indignation. We are
moved by the universal sympathies of a Shakespeare, not by anti-this. Men
can safely become discontented with themselves when they are understood &
loved. The tragic artist sees men as neither good nor bad; they just are, & the
tragic poet loves them as such.”
[Author]: Christianity is the morality of love; Judaism, the love of mo-
rality. The Cross somehow symbolizes the reconciliation of God’s infinite con-
cern for men with the tragic acceptance of undeserved suffering. Chekhov said: “Everything in nature has a meaning, and everything is forgiven, and it would
be strange not to forgive.”
[Critic of the Hearth: Day 2]—[Critic]: I would say that everything
[Critic of the Hearth: Day 2]—[Critic]: I would say that everything
human is legitimate. It’s hatred and repression of the human that is immoral. I
suppose I must admit I have a morality; but it’s not a code of regulations, nor
an ideal standard one usually fails to attain. It’s a discovery of what it means
to be human. Think of a human as a harmonious whole. When you know your-
self with the same compassion with which the wise man treats his fellows,
many impulses will be transformed. What is wrong is not that a ‘sinner’ does
too much, but that one expresses too little. We are painfully learning that we
can never destroy any part of our mental or spiritual energy, all we can do is
to redirect it into creative channels.
“Asceticism sound wonderful in theory, but in practice it has turned
into moralistic negativism of the worst sort.” [Author]: How would you prac-
tice self-discipline? [Critic]: Take on yourself the growth-giving agony of
making mature decisions. Find the Ultimate Love, and finite things at once
appear both smaller and dearer in its light. Above all, be unselfconscious.
[Author]: It is better to give the Bread of Life to others than to make a virtue
of going without one’s supper. [Critic]: Spontaneity is the essence of the spiri-
tual life.
[Author]: I rather like the idea of a life-affirming Abbey; I would [have]
[Author]: I rather like the idea of a life-affirming Abbey; I would [have]
its motto be ‘Love and do as you please.’ [Critic]: We become ourselves only
in a loving relationship. [Author]: Spiritual maturity means giving that sort of
love to others. [Critic]: When you are ready to love genuinely, and not from a
sense of duty.
[Critic of the Hearth: Day 3]: [Critic]: I went to a Quaker meeting
[Critic of the Hearth: Day 3]: [Critic]: I went to a Quaker meeting
today. [I heard about] thinking kindly thoughts, our government & Russian
foreign policy, a simile between something & electricity, & Jesus. It was quite
a shock to hear something religious; I wonder what people got out of it spiritu-
ally. There was no sense of worship, no awe, no Presence. I bring what I can
to meeting, but some-times I’m empty & want to be filled. Let’s keep one day
a week for pure, single-minded worship, something that gives spiritual income
for our spiritual expenditures during the week.
[Critic]: What is the sacrament [for Quakers]? [Author]: What is the
[Critic]: What is the sacrament [for Quakers]? [Author]: What is the
test of really helpful worship? Worship should be therapeutic. [Critic]: The
real function of our encounter with the Presence of the Ultimate is to heal.
[Author]: Prayer has always been the creative agent in sanctification. [Critic]:
Prayer has been made a kind of religious duty. [Author]: How is neglect of
prayer and meditation responsible for a lot of our frenetic do-goodism and
general lack of depth? [Critic]: Spiritual power is where you find it, and you
do not have to be a salesman for any one method. We must broaden our mea-
ning of the word ‘prayer’ if we are to defend it universally. Anything transfor-
ming is a contact with God and a communication of divine love.
“My people with spiritual power, my saints, are inconspicuous, hard-
“My people with spiritual power, my saints, are inconspicuous, hard-
working people who work through love, whither they are consciously religious
or not. A real miracle to me is when something happens which, thought quite
explicable by natural laws, is, when seen more deeply transparent to God; anything can be seen that deeply. Much of the writing on prayer cultivates self-
ignorance, ignoring ‘distracting’ thoughts, in order to manufacture an approved
state of mind. That’s like sweeping the dust under your carpet.” [Author]; The
great mystics always spoke of having to enter the ‘cell of self-knowledge’ be-
fore going further.
[Critic]: Instead of ignoring ‘distractions’, why not listen to them, cap-
ture them & find out what is really going on in the pre-conscious area of
your mind? How [do we] know what we are really doing? To know yourself is
to know the quality of your relationships with others, and to know other people
is to learn your reactions to them and hence yourself. [Author]: Knowledge of
relationships, beginning with oneself, is the important thing that clears the way
for learning how to love—love being the perfect relationship. [Critic]: Here is
the true sacrament: the human therapeutic love which necessarily brings the
Real Presence of divine Love.
[Critic of the Hearth: Day 4]—[Critic: When it come to belief] Qua-
kers should bear witness to a reality, not produce just another religious opinion.
Something has to happen to you, which becomes the basis of your interpreta-
tion and which helps you interpret other things. [Author]: For me, religion is
not so much a particular kind of experience as it is a way of seeing all experi-
ence, the sunny and the stormy. One has assurance and uncertainty.
[Critic]: One is sure of the reality and skeptical of his formulations.
Religious people cling to words so much that they can’t be very sure of the
reality. One is led to one’s ideas [of God] by actual contact with that power.
Human beings are the only animals who have a faculty for not taking things
for granted. Plato wrote: “If, Theaetetus you should ever conceive afresh, you
will be soberer and humbler & gentler to others, & will be too modest to fancy
that you know what you do not know. These are the limits of my art; I can no
further go …”
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86. Blake’s 4-fold Vision (by Harold Goddard; 1956)
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About the Author—Harold Goddard (1878-1950) was born in Worces-
ter, MA. He attended Amherst College graduating in 1900. He taught mathe-
matics there for two years. An interest in literature led him to Columbia Uni-
versity; he received a PhD in English & comparative literature in 1909. He
taught at Northwestern University 1904-1909. From 1909 to his retirement in
1946, he was the English Department head at Swarthmore College. Although
often believed to be a Quaker, Goddard was never a full member.
[Introduction]—In one sense you must dig into William Blake as you
[Introduction]—In one sense you must dig into William Blake as you
would into a problem in integral calculus. But in a deeper sense, you must just
throw a kiss to him as he flies by. ”I give you the end of a golden string, Only
wind it into a ball. It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate, built in Jerusalem’s
[liberty’s] wall.” Blake was a great believer in moments. [The 1st of 4 mo-
ments here was] when he was about 8 or 9. He . . . told his parents he had
seen a tree full of angels. Obscure, almost unrecognized, often close to pover-
ty, he went quietly ahead consecrating himself to his work as poet & creative
designer. [In the 2nd moment] he distinctly saw his brother’s soul rise from
his body . . . clap his hands for joy & ascend. [In the 3rd moment he ejected a
drunken soldier from his garden]... It was [his patron] William Hayley in sym-
bolic form that he ejected from his garden…
[Upon his death] he spoke words of love and unconscious poetry, he
drew, he sang, he showed faith, he was silent. Blake had the assets of insanity
without the liabilities [i.e. genius].
Blake's Life and 4-fold Vision—Blake's life naturally falls into the
Blake's Life and 4-fold Vision—Blake's life naturally falls into the
phases of Innocence, Experience, Revolution or Rebellion, & Vision. In each
of his 4 phases Blake was prophetic. Of modern industrial capitalism Blake
wrote:”In every cry of every Man, in every infant’s cry of fear. In every voice,
in every ban, the mind fogged manacles I hear". [Blake had similar things to
say about] war, [the organized church], the tyrannies of family life, & wrong
conceptions of love and marriage. Among modern occidentals Blake was the
Columbus of the soul. His Atlantic was Time itself; his Indies Eternity.
[In society] Reason was the god of the 18th century. To Blake, Reason
[In society] Reason was the god of the 18th century. To Blake, Reason
is the Great Divider. Divide those to be governed into factions and rule them,
while they fight. Mental despotism does the same. The great instrument of the
Great Divider is the abstract word. . . If Blake detested the abstract . . . he
almost deified the Minute Particulars. “To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To
Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.”
Integrate the conscious & the unconscious is the modern psychological
Integrate the conscious & the unconscious is the modern psychological
cry. Marry Heaven and Hell, says Blake, meaning the same thing. What can
[marry] us with our lost underworld? Blake’s answer [is] IMAGINATION.
[Excerpts from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell]: “To create a little flower
is the labor of ages . . . Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapa-
city. . . You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than
enough. . . The crooked road with Improvement are roads of Genius. . . It in-
deed appeared to Reason as if desire was cast out, but the Devil’s account is,
that the Messiah fell, and formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss.”
Blake accepts both [Milton’s Satan and the Greek’s Prometheus] & reconciles
them.
Why doesn’t a seed decay like a bit of dead leaf, or go on lying
there unchanged like a pebble? The sun’s rays somehow or other penetrates
to the seed buried down there in the dark. How is there a tiny invisible sun
inside the seed with a strange affinity between it and the great sun? How
does the seed somehow retain a memory that it was once a water-lily? It
had faith.
The prophet Isaiah in The Marriage of Heaven & Hell says: My senses
discovered the infinite in everything . . . All poets believe that [firm persuasion
that a thing is so makes it so], and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion
removed mountains.” Eternity is at one and the same time the principle of life
with the egg & the state or region outside the shell. “What is above is within."
Blake was a pioneer. He is unfinished. [His] Prophetic Books are an immense
allegory of the human soul, a concrete & symbolic psychology . . . the history
of heaven and hell [and] his autobiography.
Reason breaks the [universal] harmony & falls from Eternity into Time.
Religion begins in revelation, and falls into dogma and the organized church.
Art begins in inspiration, & falls into slavery to rules & technique. Education
begins in love for the child, & falls into methods &d regimentation. Blake . . .
recognizes five worlds or states:
1. Eden (Innocence) or Eternity, imagination, creativity, Divine Love;
1. Eden (Innocence) or Eternity, imagination, creativity, Divine Love;
symbol is sun
2. Beulah (nearest Eternity), sleep, dreams, and human love; symbol is
2. Beulah (nearest Eternity), sleep, dreams, and human love; symbol is
moon (reflecting the sun, Eternity, Divine love)
3. [Mid-region], Science; symbol is stars
4. Generation, Earthly Life (prison of the senses), physical love; symbol
3. [Mid-region], Science; symbol is stars
4. Generation, Earthly Life (prison of the senses), physical love; symbol
is Sex, unclear boundary between this world and the next which is
5. Ulro: opacity, frigidity, contraction; symbol is Darkness, or Matter.
And a 4-fold vision is given to me; tis 4-fold in my supreme delight And 3-fold
in soft Beulah’s night.
And 2-fold Always. May God us keep from Single Vision and Newton’s sleep.
Single Vision is simply ordinary physical eyesight; it is to 4-fold sight
what blindness is to ordinary sight. It is the belief that you can find the es-
sence of things by measuring and weighing them. Double Vision is [when
one] realizes . . . that everything around him gives back the image of one’s
life: the path; the unseen wind, the tree that is two trees (root and branch).
Poetry and Painting are images . . . Simply thoughts that have come to life.
The moment images begin to interweave, interplay, form constellations,
marry and beget new images, we have Threefold Vision. [Here] beautiful
thoughts are the wings of the soul. Whoever has created a work of art and
felt inspired at the moment he conceived it has an inkling of Blake’s 3-fold
vision.
4-fold Vision is simply dreaming, loving, imagining with such inten-
sity that [the images] obliterate daylight as daylight ordinarily obliterates the
dream. [Mundane sensations become sublime and beyond sublime.] Blake
says: “I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Sight any more than I
would Question a Window concerning a [fourfold] Sight. I look through it,
not with it. Put more [people] more often, into a more elevated state of ima-
gination, and everything else follows. Imagination uncreates not only anger,
but all the other 7 deadly sins. [Imagination proceeds from mitigating, to
forgiving, to forgetting, to uncreating evil].
This is the clue to Blake’s tremendous emphasis on art, the language
of the imagination, [the coin with which to buy Heaven]. ”The Whole Busi-
ness of Man is Art.” Force can only be overcome by a higher order of force
[i.e. Imagination]. When the greatest [minds] of the ages [e.g. Dante,
Shakespeare, Dostoevsky] agree [with Blake], if their agreement isn't truth,
what is truth? Dostoevsky writes the following: in “The Dream of a Ridi-
culous Man”: I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition
of mankind. . . Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass, yet shall
I go on preaching it. . . The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that’s
the great thing, that’s everything. [They say that] consciousness of life is
higher than life. . . and the laws of happiness higher than happiness—that
is what one must contend against."
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87. A shelter from compassion (by Ruth E. Durr; 1956)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR—Ruth Durr is native to Philadelphia. She studied architecture at the University of PA. She is a member of Abington Monthly Mee- ting of the Society of Friends & has been active in the Young Friends Move- ment. Ruth spent 2 terms at Pendle Hill. This essay was read as a Term Paper at Pendle Hill.
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87. A shelter from compassion (by Ruth E. Durr; 1956)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR—Ruth Durr is native to Philadelphia. She studied architecture at the University of PA. She is a member of Abington Monthly Mee- ting of the Society of Friends & has been active in the Young Friends Move- ment. Ruth spent 2 terms at Pendle Hill. This essay was read as a Term Paper at Pendle Hill.
[Madwoman on Chestnut]—A madwoman has no reason to be on Chestnut Street. But there she was, [amidst the hustle and bustle of] the noon rush hour, shuffling dreamily along in her little aura of obliviousness to the cha- otic tempo all about her. Her hair jutted out [in all directions] under the frayed brim of a filthy hat. She was an incongruous assortment of fashions, one black and one white tennis shoe tied on with twine. She carried a bulging shopping- bag, & clutched a bundle of yellowed news-papers. [She was singing a hymn], bawling in a strident voice that still suggested a trace of sweetness. I forgot about the errand I was on and paused in a doorway. Most passersby were too engrossed in their own pursuits even to notice the madwoman.
A few noticed & averted their eyes. They had learned long ago that it isn’t nice to stare at exceptional people. Young stenographers at first sauntered glamorously, then broke ranks, whispered, tittered, and giggled among them- selves. A half-dozen office boys burst into hoarse guffaws & hootings. Some had faces veiled with pity, who lowered their eyes and shook their heads in puzzled sadness. Mink-clad matrons exchanged disapproving glances, saying: “Really!! Something should be done about this sort of spectacle.” A small child demanded to know “what’s the matter with that funny lady?” A shabby old woman snorted & sneered with cold hostility.
I slipped back into the stream of pedestrians & moved pensively on the inner side. I wasn’t shocked. Strangest of all, I felt no pity for the mad-woman; the time to pity her had passed. She had been hurt far beyond all endurance & had bought imperviousness to further hurt. She was on the other side of fear now, free even from the fear of madness. Men go mad because it is the only can escape their humanity & still remain alive. Perhaps her madness was saner than the sanity of those recoiling from her disquieting appearance. Perhaps, while they had merely sight & senses, she had visions so celestial to tempt all men to madness, a world of unfettered fantasies, of buoyant dreams lifting her to the very feet of God. She may indeed have been with God in paradise.
There was no cause to judge [the confused, chained ones around her], that they shrank from the huge challenge she laid upon them. I saw that they cared too much and couldn't bear to know they cared. [In caring], they would have been engulfed in a sense of impotence and guilt, useless both to themselves and to her. Their only sin lay in a pathetic lack of integrity & disloy- alty to higher instincts.
Once having opened the gates on compassion, they would be in danger of being led further out of themselves & into the madwoman than they could let themselves be. [They might be stranded & perish] in an unexplored Antarctic of the spirit. They might have glimpsed God’s face, which frail mortality couldn’t survive. Better to never to unlock those gates. Everyone has built themselves shelter from compassion, the Self's moated castle, drawn up against besieging claims of sorrows not their own. Compassion is internal, no external armor can silence it.
Refuge from Humankind—Each of us according to skills & materials at hand fashions his own little fortified retreat. As individual, finite creatures we are bound to virtually complete engrossment in personal and family interests. For those whose lives merely touch it tangentially we have only the crumbs that fall from the table. The size of the world’s sorrow is far too vast. The one realistic choice is to pass by in dispassionate silence.
We are so unschooled in the arts of human kindness that we have little to say or do when confronted by a distressed soul. Through ignorance we are cruel to one another. It is probably better that we evade any demand upon us to be consoling, since we do it so inexpertly. But it is only by [the difficult] breaking through mutual barriers & learning to see others as they see themselves that we can establish a true ground for compassion.
[Instead], we can throw ourselves zealously into the large, vague causes that bear the clear label of magnanimity but never bring us too close to the hurt that is starkly written in one man’s eyes. [Involvement in such a cause] is the most deceptive because it works not by [dismissing the] need to feel compassion, but by assuring us that we do feel compassion. Then there is the plea-of-innocence shelter. “I had nothing to do with driving the old woman out of her mind. I have no power to help her.” And there is the flight into fantasy. What better escape can there be than to people a little world of dream-folk, where we can lavish sympathy without restraint.
The turtle-shell refuge is perennially popular because it is portable and ready for occupancy at a moment’s notice. The upper shell grows from the belief that our own troubles are very heavy, that the world is hostile toward us. The lower shell is formed of the little devices we have evolved for being nice to our- selves to atone for the shabby way that life has treated us. The house of mirrors reflects back the attitude of the crowd around us. No more is required of us than is standard for “other people.”
For the pious the shelter may take the form of a temple, and rituals in the cult of non-compassion. Its devotees view the sufferings of others as a well- merited consequence of their transgressions. The methodical minded will cate- gorize people into those with whom we sympathize, & those with whom we don't. The deciding criteria are those facets of their nature over which they have little or no control. The storm-cellar brand of refuge is the lowliest of them all; [it treats life as a race and everyone as a competitor; it would be foolish to stop & help anyone]. There is a secret wicked delight that can be drawn from the fail- ures and miseries of other people. Their appearance of failure gives us the ap- pearance of success.
Although a soul may crumble under the burden of the loss of some thing immeasurably precious, it is out of triumph over this sorrow that the sublimity & greatness of the human spirit have sprung; never having had anything that pre- cious to lose brings the decay of bitterness & frustration, and a numbed and crippled being. People can sympathize with the grief-stricken; but they can only despise & reject those who never possessed anything precious to lose. Such people are the poor in spirit whom only Christ has blest.
The very fortifications that shield us from the world’s tears will doom us in our turn to weep alone. A shelter from compassion [is] a barricade from God. If any man would learn God’s name, let him join the kinship of God’s concern, [from the universe to] the plight of a lonely man & a fallen sparrow. The God within us is compassion. More precious to God’s heart than wine in a jeweled chalice is a tear in secret shed for another creature’s sorrow.
88. Nonviolent resistance: a nation’s way to peace (by Cecil E.
Hinshaw; 1956)
About the Author—Cecil Hinshaw graduated from Friends University in Wichita, Kansas, attended Illiff School of Theology; he did graduate work
at Denver & Harvard Universities. He was president of William Penn College for 5 years. He lectures for American Friends Service Committee and the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
[Introduction]—2 contrasting truths dominate our human scene [in this century]: the perhaps record amount of generosity, kindliness, & sym- pathy expressed, contrasted with unprecedented cruelty & barbarity. No responsible person can dodge the necessity of dealing with the evil one meets; one must do it knowing that God works with one through the eternal forces of goodness. Our 1st responsibility is to deal with the evil in ourselves. The tyranny couldn't fasten itself upon a nation and be maintained were it
not mixed with much good.
Answers to Tyranny/Irony of War/Balance of Terror—[2 trends are observed in responding to tyranny: pure evil to be eliminated by any means; mix of good & evil, best left alone for the good to eventually triumph]. Both of these answers are wrong. Underneath all of the questionable motives that support national defense efforts, there remains an inescapable responsi- bility. [History teaches us] the hard fact that there have been times of terri- ble, unjustified aggression. The moral necessity of national defense is there- fore almost an axiom.
There are very few responsible leaders who believe that successful military defense in an atomic war is possible. [Anyone attempting to prove otherwise] is assuming a terrifying burden of proof. Any [sweeping] change
in thought & [method] can only come slowly in society. People will continue to rationalize an old error until a positive & hopeful alternative can be found.
The only real hope left to most people today is the gamble that the threat of terror through massive retaliation will prevent the coming of total war. An uneasy peace can be preserved by a balance of terror while we wait for positive changes in Communist countries. But atomic war may come even though neither side intends for it to happen. [Even] atomic experiments may exact a terrible price from the world. There certainly comes a point beyond which we don't have the right to gamble the lives & sanity of future generations.
The Limitation of Limited Warfare—If the wars of the future can be sharply limited, America faces a strategic problem of immense proportions. Conventional warfare requires tremendous manpower. For all practical pur- poses America will have to fight such wars alone in the future. The logical consequences of trying to fight such wars with conventional weapons thou- sands of miles from home, handicapped by logistics across vast distances [and tough guerilla fighters] is to bleed America of its strength.
We can understand why military officials wish to use atomic weapons in such a war. If the enemy did not counter with similar weapons, we might secure military victory, but there seems no particular reason why the enemy could not use such weapons in return. If we were to be the 1st to use atomic weapons, we could lose very heavily in prestige & support,& alienate large numbers of Asian peoples. We have not really considered the moral posi tion we would be in if we should use atomic weapons only to find that an “immoral” enemy capable of using them refused on moral grounds to retali- ate with them.
The temptation of the losing side will be very strong to use ever more destructive weapons. Underlying all of these problems is the haunting spec- ter of the condemnation of our own consciences as well as the world's mo- ral judgment if we dare to begin an atomic conflict. Is the enemy's destruc- tion in retaliation, justified by any standard of morals & principles we have valued and taught?
Losing Friends & Alienating People—The Communists have in- flamed old sores scarcely healed over from the wounds of imperialism; it will keep the US in the minds of millions as the successor to the imperialism they learned to hate in the days of white man domination. The Communists will also use the promise of practical aid in the vast projects & plans to which so many governments now look for relief from poverty's crushing burdens. Both Russia and China are industrializing rather successfully without any considerable outside help;] the new countries want to do the same as much as possible].
The really dangerous advantage Communism has is its eager alli- ance everywhere with the forces of revolution against feudalism and en- trenched wealth. [Our “natural” allies end up being] dictators, corrupt political leaders, & possessors of great wealth; it is these groups who will most op- pose Communism, since it will destroy them if it triumphs. [The answer to] why our beneficence is often so little appreciated is our motives are deeply questioned. Wise and understanding aid, given primarily through the UN to help people help themselves ,coupled with willingness on our part to trade freely, is essential & promising. If it were freed of the unholy alliances with corrupt military & political elements, it would benefit the countries much more than is the case now.
Positions of Strength—To avoid errors in present practice & gene- rally accepted theories, we need to begin by a survey of the resources at our command: power of freedom; religion; productive capacity & technical know- ledge; the limitation of tyranny; The power of passive resistance.
The Power of Freedom, even when falling short of the theory, stands as beacon lights to our world, the promise of a better future. That people are made for & long for freedom is an article of faith. Our tradition & principles are in harmony with a fundamental drive in human nature. Our practice has not always been attractive. America must be reasonably cleansed of racial discrimination before we can hope to exert real leadership in world predomi- nantly composed of colored people.
Religion [is vulnerable] to having its inconsistencies & failures pointed out. It can produce persistent re-births of spiritual power, but we must peni- tently recognize a present lack of spiritual depth & vitality. Religion answers to a deeply felt need in humans, a need that can never be erased, even in Communist countries. Religion's power to draw people & to hold their loy- alty depends in very great measure upon the extent to which religious insti- tutions & leaders truly embody & practice their ideals. Perhaps any really successful defense of our values and ideals can only be [in concert with] a new outburst, [a new surge] of religious life.
Productive Capacity & Technical Knowledge, while in Communist hands, can rapidly industrialize a country [at great human cost], but with a system of more freedom & liberty there's a firmer foundation for material pro- gress & human well-being. If these resources can be used in harmony with our religious and political ideals, they will be like a blood transfusion to the world.
The Limitation of Tyranny [is that totalitarian governments aren't as po- werful as they claim to be, & as Americans think they are]. They can cause real damage, so we must strongly oppose the advance of totalitarianism in our world. Russia & China have religion growing, even though the official policy still allows only worship services & choir practices, prohibiting church schools & other such functions. Despite government propaganda, threats, & persecutions, the peasants haven't been successfully regimented. There is a limit past which no government, no matter whatever its nature, can go in enforcing laws contrary to the people's will.
The Power of Passive Resistance means there is no power that can force the obedience of masses of people to laws and authority they have decided to resist. Gandhi’s contribution at this point to our problem is monu- mental. There will be those who say that Gandhi’s experience is not appli- cable to us. And Gandhi’s refusal to sanction military opposition was due to principle & not to any supposition that no other course was open. Other critics will say that the British yielded before they were forced to. This view magnifies the goodness of England beyond what the facts warrant & mini- mizes the evil in the English rule. The goodness in the British that resulted in yielding so generously may be attributed in part to the validity of the Gan- dhian method.
How would these methods fail against [the USSR]? Some will say that Communist rule over a long time so changes men that, regardless of how they personally feel, they will obey any order. [There is evidence that isn't universally true]. Genuine and trusted Communists have refused to obey orders, even at the cost of their lives. The result would probably de- pend on the extent to which the passive resisters were able to persist, re- gardless of enemy persecution, in maintaining a united stand in a spirit free of hatred and largely imbued with friendship and love. We have at hand a weapon of resistance to evil that can replace the now antiquated, useless, & dangerous atomic warfare upon which we still rely for defense.
The Moral Equivalent of War—William James wrote an essay in which he called for a moral equivalent of warfare. How can the power of freedom, Religion, Productive capacity and technical knowledge, the limitation of tyranny, the power of passive resistance be wielded to- gether to form a workable, promising equivalent of war? I am convinced that the development of public opinion in our own country in the direction I am suggesting would release powerful social & political forces in our allies that would move them along with us more rapidly.
This defense method would require the same opportunity for adequate preparation as military defense. No method of defense is any better than the skill, ability, dedication, faith & courage of those who practice it. We must recognize our limitations. Our work can only be exploratory. It is our obliga- tion to go as far as possible in pointing the way. Such attempts, [whether fail- ure or success], often are the necessary preliminary to later plans much wiser and better. Because there is so little hope in any other plan that can be offered we have a right to assume that our plan will not be ruled out of con- sideration just because risks are involved.
New Weapons for Old—We now begin putting together power of free- dom, religion, productive capacity & technical knowledge, limitations of tyran- ny, & power of passive resistance into a pattern of national defense which will exclude the element of military power. The growth of such a thought would mean that ultimately it would be embodied in a political program & in
an eventual victory at the polls.
The 1st act of this new government would be to issue a proclamation in accordance with the promises it made in the election campaign. While cal- ling on other governments to disarm, this government would proceed to take such action unilaterally. Others would be invited to send official observers of our disarmament process. Our government would have developed a passive resistance program to be used if any attempt were ever made to invade us. As rapidly as savings in manpower & resources were realized, our govern- ment would make substantial technical assistance available to underdeve- loped countries through the UN without any political restrictions.
On Winning Friends and Influencing People—The nation able & willing to help & guide the momentous change toward industrialization, if it proceeds carefully & wisely, [will create new] relationships with these deve- loping people, [especially since the aid will no longer be] tied to a bankrupt military policy. In spite of past & present limitations, our aid programs have made significant contributions toward helping to save a number of political situations in our world because the welfare of people has been genuinely advanced by the help given.
The possibilities in a truly great technical assistance program are al- most unlimited in the results that could be achieved in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, parts of Europe, and South America. A plan aimed at releasing the vast potential of human & material resources yet unrealized, & at helping people help themselves, can produce almost immediate gains & the promise of vastly greater improvements in the future.
The concern that countries would be overrun by the Communists is answered by [observing that] people with hope & faith in their future don’t provide the chaos & disorder that Communism needs in order to take over a country easily. And our passive resistance program [might inspire others to join] a united program of nations in a passive resistance defense program. [In viewing the Communist takeover of China, virtually every authority agrees that no amount of additional aid or even direct action could have prevented Communist victory. Any attempt to protect all the world is trying to play God. The probable effect of our new policy & defense program would be the win- ning of new friends & co-workers much more effectively than we are doing now.
Moral Jujitsu—Any Communist attempt to anticipate the results of our actions, and to counter them would mean giving up rigid Communist doctrines about capitalism’s and democracy’s nature. Communism is dis- covering that not even economic & political programs are sufficient to over- come nationalism. Without the non-Communist world’s military threat, natu- rally divisive forces between Communist countries would assert themselves.
Within a Communist government, when there is no longer foreign mili- tary strength to fear, internal dissensions are much more likely to develop. [With disarmament of non-Communist countries], justification of a military policy would be much more difficult and consequently the trend toward more consumer goods would be extremely hard to resist. Our proposed policy
would create confusion in Communist ranks. [If they didn't join us in dis- armament], all preceding peace talk would be proven to be hollow and hypocritical. For Russia and China to remain armed when we disarmed would cost the Communist very heavily in the esteem of the world. Would they pay the price? Or How would Russia & China join us in disarma- ment in order to compete more favorably for the world’s support?
The Strategy of Passive Resistance—We must now deal with the effect on our country if it adopted this policy, & an attempt were made to [oc- cupy us in] our disarmed state. To be prepared in this case is to lessen the likelihood of having to meet that for which we prepare. [It is unlikely] that enemy would destroy undefended cities. [If they are undefended, there is no advantage, & in fact a disadvantage to bombing them]. Our disarmament
would remove any idea that we were a threat to other nations; the attack would be condemned & resented. It is more likely we would be occupied by an army; this is what our defense policy must be directed against.
We who seek to win the consent of other people to our view, assume the responsibility of planning a passive resistance defense policy, and the organizing of such a force. Such theoretical planning would never be com- pletely done. [The research studies on it would done with] grants replacing present programs of research for military purposes. By what means would we apply our [passive resistance] principles to our defense's problems?
We'd have no right to ask our country to follow such a policy were we not able at the same time to point to a corps of able, dedicated, disciplined
people operating in a proven organization structure. In Gandhi’s experience, as many as 400,000 people were organized into such a group. [For our purposes] let us suggest a goal of roughly one million people organized into such a group.
The function of this organization would be: teaching & persuading the American people, winning them to acceptance of a passive resistance policy; application of principles to American problems; developing a specific plan of operation for the nation when passive resistance is adopted; forming skeletal organization to serve as pilot model of volunteers in a passive resistance de- fense corps; members’ continued purification and spiritual growth.
With the people’s preparation & education firmly in place, there would be trained, dedicated people ready to volunteer in the new defense plans, somewhat like the National Guard. There must also be a small group of men in full-time service to provide leadership and plans for the larger group. The total organization would be throughout the country, woven into industrial, social, & educational institutions. With the aid of educational & religious leaders, we would teach the outlines of our policy and attempt to build mo- rale necessary to undergird it.
Weapons of Love—There are 2 “weapons of love”: civil disobedi- ence; words & non-violent action. The civil disobedience program would have as its purpose preventing the occupation army from gaining effective control of the nation (e.g refusing to pay taxes, strikes, & filling the prisons). Effectiveness depends on good planning and preparation, & the persistence of the people. Each person in it would know what his responsibility was in leading other people. This would include a long chain through which leader- ship could be passed in the event that leaders were imprisoned or killed. We can have faith that such leadership will keep replenishing itself in a time of crisis.
The nation's persistence in the civil disobedience campaign would be essential and would depend on having a culturally and religiously strong nation. We must assume that an occupation army would find some people willing to cooperate with it in the attempt to rule the country. Such 5th columnists would be a serious problem only if their numbers were consider- able. People ultimately value the approval of their friends & neighbors and hesitate to take action that will meet with stern and continuing disapproval.
No greater mistake could be made than to suppose that such a cam- paign as this could be carried out without loss of life or property. No kind of defense possible to us today can promise safety to the nation's occupants. The values of freedom can't be [sacrificed because lives might be lost]. The real question is the calculated judgment as to which method of defense will cost least & be most likely to succeed. Government officials, industrial and labor leaders, communications officials, and religious leaders would thus be imprisoned. If brutality does not accomplish obedience, the danger of its indefinite continuance isn't as great as it first appears. [Where] organized resistance took place in the past, little killing took place.
The 1st step in understanding the power of passive resistance is the recognition of the natural aversion of all to suffering, personal or witnessed. Then, there is the understanding that our natural repugnance to suffering is accentuated when we are the cause of that pain. Psychologists say that sadism is explained by inner conflict in a person & not by the unmitigated brutality of man’s nature. We must find justification for causing suffering. When the evil-doer is met by [nonviolent], forgiving, suffering love, they are left with no basis for self-justification, and are shaken and psychologically defenseless. If one causes death of an innocent, defenseless, yet spiri- tually unbeaten oppone nt, one has posed for one’s self an unanswerable psychological problem.
The strength of passive resistance lies in the fact that victory with even a small minority greatly weakens the morale & power of an enemy by creating internal division in his ranks. No occupation army becomes so de- praved or so completely controlled as to be impervious to the power of pas- sive resistance. The time comes when psychological civil war started in the enemy by passive resistance demoralizes his aggressiveness and the machine of cruelty and madness grinds to a halt.
The 2nd weapon is all the means of persuasion at our command in leading the individual members of an occupation to see both the futility and the evil of their policy. We seek refusal to continue to obey unjust orders. The revelation of what life could be like, both in material abundance and pol- itical freedom, coupled with the opportunity among friendly people to escape, would be a powerful motivation to desertion. We have hardly begun to under- stand what propaganda could mean on our side in such a case.
To those who doubt that our people could sustain such a policy, & overcome their own hate and fear, I would suggest instilling the simple truth that the occupation army's soldier is a human being under pressure from the dictatorship [who sent him, & is in need of healing]. Once a person sees himself as the doctor in the doctor-patient relationship, it is far easier to prac- tice self-control and follow the Golden Rule. The few pioneers who have broken through the hate and fear barrier are making it increasingly clear that love and goodwill can actually work miracles, that no man is ever totally depraved.
At the worst, the cost of using “weapons of love” would be a long, costly struggle over a generation or two. We should be prepared to suffer ourselves, having the real hope that the enemy would ultimately be con- quered. No tyranny is free from the laws of change that operate throughout history, upsetting all attempts to perpetuate a static system. At best, the virus of civil disobedience and love of liberty would spread through the occu- pying troops & spread to their homeland & destroy the dictatorship.
Even at its worst who can believe that atomic war would be better than nonviolent resistance of an occupying force? It appears more reasonable to conclude that the peaceful change of Communism into a more desirable form of government would be the highly probable result of a policy of disarmament and passive resistance.
“Seek Ye 1st the Kingdom of God”—Passive resistance’s maximum effectiveness rests upon its adoption as a way of life. Our hope is in a revita- lized & spiritually strengthened people able to derive full benefits from a rea- sonably complete program like the one described here. This isn't to say that all the nation’s people must operate on a saintly level, or even a majority. A minority of dedicated & selfless people can carry a heavy part of the load of the whole nation. Such [spiritual] leadership lifts the whole nation's moral & religious level perceptibly. The application of passive resistance to racial discrimination would advance us in finding a creative solution to it.
History is remolded only by those who dedicate [their whole lives to a vision]. There comes a time when partial goodness is a terrible sin. Perso- nal purification is desirable, but it should never be mistaken for the event we call Pentecost, for history-making epochs when people have seen God’s hand working to redeem a world. The outlines of the work to be done must appear dimly before men can be asked to dedicate their lives to it.
The Art of the Possible—How is there the possibility that such a radical change to a foreign policy of [disarmament & passive resis- tance] can be accomplished? History has many examples of changes that most people & even the experts, have repudiated as not possible. It must also be recorded that the way was beset by doubts and discouragements & ridicule. The alternatives to this method are increasingly so hopeless that more and more people can be expected to join the enlarging ranks of those few [opposing] reliance on atomic weapons.
The next encouraging sign is that the principle of passive resistance & nonviolence is practiced in more & more spheres of life [e.g. mental hygiene, prison reform, race relations]. Gandhi demonstrated that masses of people can be won to the use of the principle and accomplish some success. A large percentage of people who have studied this principle have accepted it.
There is a period of slow growth while a kind of bandwagon move- ment develops. If this program is based on truth, it will more & more com- mend itself to thoughtful people. Personal reading, investigation & presen- tation of this principle throughout America is needed. It is our responsibility to do all that we are able, leaving the issue of our efforts in God’s hands to be worked out in the long history of humankind.
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89. Scruples (by Gilbert Kilpack; 1956)
About the Author and Pamphlet—Gilbert Kilpack (1914-99) was
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89. Scruples (by Gilbert Kilpack; 1956)
About the Author and Pamphlet—Gilbert Kilpack (1914-99) was
born & raised in Portland, Oregon. He did undergraduate work at the Uni-
versity of Oregon & received an M.A. degree from Oberlin College in Chris-
tian Philosophy. He spent 5 years as Stony Run Friends Meeting's (Balti-
more) executive secretary. He joined Pendle Hill's staff in '48, becoming
Director of Studies in '54. He gave Philadelphia Young Friends Movement’s
Penn Lecture in '46, "The City of God and City of Man," which addressed
issues raised by the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombings.
A scruple was originally an ancient Roman weight; then it developed
into a word meaning “difficulty in deciding what is right.” This essay explores
what it means to have scruples. His other pamphlets were: 32. Our Hearts
are Restless, 1946; 63. Ninth Hour, 1951; 349. The Radiance and Risks of
Myth-making, 2000.
Scruples is not among the honored seven [deadly sins]; it deserves
Scruples is not among the honored seven [deadly sins]; it deserves
to stand at the head of a list of ... “the seven subtle sins.” Faber speaks of
them as “sins under the pretext of good . . . little centers of spiritual death
spotting the soul, a kind of moral [rash]. [How] have you had an [unfol-
lowed], God-given leading which . . . you feared you could not carry
it through as expertly as you thought you should? We stand in the
kingdom's doorway, but a stone in our shoe keeps us always limping, always
about to move on in.
Theologically, a scruple is defined as a “vain fear of sin where there
is no reason . . . for suspecting sin,” A scruple as I use it here shall refer to
. . . an imperfect or unbalanced conscience . . . unsupported by an equally
strong faith. Place the teaching of [universal responsibility] in its great
setting, the great divine-human household where God is seen to enter into
and share all joy and all sorrow. With John Woolman [a scruple] . . . is his
and share all joy and all sorrow. With John Woolman [a scruple] . . . is his
whole sensitive being, open . . . to new spiritual leading, which stops his
going on in habitual and accepted ways. . . the inward “No, this I can't do.”
His . . . are prompted by . . . an earnest desire that no act or omission of his
own should add to the evil and misery under which the creation groans.
[An excess of scruples] is a deficiency disease. It attacks where there
[An excess of scruples] is a deficiency disease. It attacks where there
is lack of grace. Self may excuse self, but the Lord’s forgiveness isn't only
a release from the burden of guilt but the renewal of integrity. It consumes
much time and energy . . . [so that] there is . . . no time left for inspired acts
of human creativity. As long as the Gospel nudges our conscience and we
resist, we must make it up with rigorous performance of numerous rituals.
The scrupulous man makes himself the slave of details, he is at the
The scrupulous man makes himself the slave of details, he is at the
mercy of minutiae. The strength of the genius lies in his command over
details, his power to subject them to his vision & will. [There are] people
who are filled with nervous energy & active in many affairs. . . but.... they
are doing little more than running in circles and burning up energy ... tepid
are doing little more than running in circles and burning up energy ... tepid
and irresolute toward life & people. The scrupulous man is a spiritual book-
keeper, and he must balance his books to the last scruple. Perfect love isn't
a scrupulous love. St. Augustine wrote “Love and do what thou wilt; whether
thou hold thy peace, of love hold thy peace; whether thou cry out, of love
cry out; whether thou correct, of love correct; whether thou spare, through
love do thou spare.”
[In] the Society of Friends in America of the mid-18th century, being
[In] the Society of Friends in America of the mid-18th century, being
scrupulous in speech, dress, & manners became their distinguishing mark.
[There was] fearful self-centeredness, a meticulous care for self-cleansing;
that freedom which blossoms in spontaneity & imagination seems to have
been smothered in the cradle. All attempts at self-purification of the church
by means of an outward code must inevitably breed scrupulosity.
I [don’t] know many [Christians] . . . who seem to have Christ’s air
I [don’t] know many [Christians] . . . who seem to have Christ’s air
of freedom. We do the right things, but without authority; our scruples
limit our freedom. Christ is never seen waiting for perfect people & perfect
situations to accomplish his work, & thus Christianity becomes the religion
of impossible situations. Christ sees the need, he feels the divine compul-
sion, and the deed is accomplished. He said, “The Sabbath was made for
man; not man for the Sabbath. . . You have a fine way of rejecting the com-
mandments of God in order to keep your tradition.” Jesus’ cry of woe to
the Scribes and the Pharisees . . . is a curse upon a meticulousness [and]
a neglect of the all important.
Faithless ones hope to enter the Kingdom by their own endeavor &
their own calculations. We can calculate how not to hurt people, but we can't
calculate how to do great good. [Jesus called for perfection, but] his . . .
perfection is come into only by self-forgetfulness, the finding of self by the
losing of self. It is thus a perfection which is wrought only by love, an . . .
losing of self. It is thus a perfection which is wrought only by love, an . . .
exorcism of the life of moral bookkeeping.
The perfection of the Christian life isn't unlike the particular beauty
The perfection of the Christian life isn't unlike the particular beauty
of an early Gothic cathedral. The old builders seemed to know “imperfect”
beauty; they knew that the perfection of the individual & of history is quite
another thing from mathematical perfection . . . The ugly gargoyles on these
old churches, symbolize ever-present temptation which is necessary to our
perfection. There are many things in life worth doing which aren't worth
doing scrupulously well. But I believe that those who live by faith do put
them together.
The saints are not resigned to their distance from [perfection], but
they accept it as the present condition of fact and rather joke about it than
fret about it. St. Paul had in his lifetime shaken every known scruple by the
hand and earned every right to be their bitterest opponent... We can appre-
ciate Paul’s judgments, particularly when we realize that he continued all
his life to wrestle with scruples. Our attention is not to be given over to the
judgment of any of our works; our attention is to be given to God & Christ.
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90. Insured by Hope (by Mildred Binns Young; 1956)
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90. Insured by Hope (by Mildred Binns Young; 1956)
About the Author—Mildred Binns Young was born in Ohio & attended
Friends schools & Western Reserve University. She lived for some years at
Westtown School, where Wilmer Young was Dean of Boys. The Youngs then
lived in the South, working under American Friends Service Committee
(AFSC) for 19 years; 4 pamphlets came out of the experience. From 1955-
1960 they were in residence at Pendle Hill.
[Quotes from William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experiences]:
“I have often thought that in the old monkish poverty-worship, in spite of the
pedantry . . . there might be something like that moral equivalent of war
which we are seeking. . . English-speaking peoples have grown literally
afraid to be poor . . . We have lost the power even of imagining what the an-
cient idealization of poverty could have meant . . . It is certain that the preva-
lent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease
from which our civilization suffers.”
First as to my title: It struck me that the eternal succession of the sea-
sons does in some real sense insure the person who works with soil & gro-
wing things . . . we can all be insured the same way. The knowledge [that]
“we are all one body in Christ” makes us whole. I myself have come by
slow, faltering, and partial steps to understand the relation of voluntary
poverty to religious life, worship and commitment, wholeness and security.
It is now 20 years since we left Westtown School . . . and went south
to work with sharecroppers. It may seem hard to see any logic in the claim
that [recognition of the oneness of all human life] prescribes poverty. We
started from no specific, religious convictions. We worked for a summer in
Kentucky coal-mining villages . . . & the next summer we worked with
unemployed men in North Philadelphia . . . who sought to help themselves.
The first American work camp was held in 1934. As the years have
gone by, the work camp in its various forms has developed into an unparal-
leled instrument for educating young people in social problems. We came to
believe that poverty and physical labor are a necessary discipline [for the
leaders of revolutions].
After we had been [at the Delta Cooperative Farm in Mississippi for]
After we had been [at the Delta Cooperative Farm in Mississippi for]
3 years, the American Friends Service Committee sponsored us in a small
project with white & Negro tenant farmers in western South Carolina. We
bought some large tracts of land & gradually sold it again in family-sized
farms to tenants who had never had any secure tenure of the land they
worked. We felt more careful for the self-respect of our neighbors than even
for their diet. We wanted to cooperate and collaborate with our neighbors
in making conditions better . . . and to not impose even improvements on
them. The things we wanted most for them . . . were not what they wanted.
While they [enjoyed prosperity] . . . we continued to live in a rather
bare way. [We felt that] we must try to show them how to be content with
their new state without wanting to raise ever further. For us, Poverty . . .
means the strict limitation of goods that are for personal use . . . the oppo-
site of the reckless abuse, misuse [& disrespect] of property. Even children
can benefit from living in graceful, orderly, [and simple] surroundings.
For a long time I have preferred the word “poverty” to “simplicity”
because I felt it was less ambiguous. “Simplicity” is an advertiser’s as much
as an idealist’s word. But let us not confuse “poverty” with “destitution”; it
is not possible to idealize “destitution.” For most human beings, destitution
is ruinous to the spirit as well as the body. “Poverty” is better & more truly
defined without adjectives. Poverty may be voluntary with one who . . .
believes that it could never be right for him to have plenty while there are
destitute people. Poverty can be taken up; true simplicity comes by God's
grace. . . only babes and great souls can be truly simple. We may equate
simplicity in this sense with the term “poor in spirit.”
Poverty of material possessions . . . isn't the same as this “poverty in
spirit,” this simplicity, this purity of heart. Multitudes spend their lives in
poverty, or with moderate possessions, without ever receiving the gift of
simplicity. Paul Tillich has lately suggested that our high rate of mental ill-
ness is partly due to people’s need to escape from the pressure of responsi-
bility for themselves, the pressure to succeed in the status & security race.
There is another escape [from competition] . . . the escape into com-
mitment to the whole of humanity. We should know . . . that “the level
above which a man’s goods become superfluous ... goes up & down accor-
ding to the needs of the poor.” As the standard of living goes up, the fear
of insecurity remains. People . . . wear out their lives in the struggle to
feel secure. The full sharing of goods, as in the early Christian community
. . . is now hardly seen except among such poor people [still unaffected]
by modern enlightened social theory. Making secure whatever standard
one has attained . . . inevitably cuts one off from one’s fellows.
Surely there can be no question that much of the dangerous strain
between our country and other countries comes from our rich standard,
which we are not willing to share, except piecemeal. . . out of our surplus.
If Americans could . . . do with less . . . in order that the poorer nations
might have necessities, we might become the leader of a peaceful world.
What we can do personally is small but it is definite, & to do it can release
us out of frustration . . . and into hope.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoievski says: True security is to be
found in social solidarity than in isolated individual effort . . . A man must
set an example, & so draw men’s soul out of their solitude, and spur them
to some act of brotherly love, that the great idea not die.” There is much
help in going as far as we can with our particular gifts in our particular cir-
cumstances.
John Woolman had a dream in which: “I was mixed in with [the mass
John Woolman had a dream in which: “I was mixed in with [the mass
of humanity and [told] henceforth that I might not consider myself as . . . a
separate being. I heard a soft melodious voice: ‘John Woolman is dead.’ I
perceived . . . that the language . . . meant no more than my own will's
death.” He had come to that point by being first of all obedient to calls for
very small sacrifices and duties, and then to . . . greater ones. We can stand
ever in sight of [the example of] Jesus [who] took upon himself the whole
burden of hope; and laid on us … the burden of hope for humanity.
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91 The Illiad or The Poem of Force (by Simone Weil; 1956)
A Note on Simone Weil [see mahn vay]—Simone Weil died in Eng-
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91 The Illiad or The Poem of Force (by Simone Weil; 1956)
A Note on Simone Weil [see mahn vay]—Simone Weil died in Eng-
land in August 1943 at the age of 34. She [exercised her mind] every day
on the highest products of art & science. [While] teaching philosophy,
mathematics & Greek language & literature, she continued to broaden her
culture. Her temperament led her to communism when she was about 20.
She lived in Germany with the Wandervogel [back-to-nature] youth; the
1st shots of the Civil War drew her to Spain. She studied the psychologi-
cal effects of modern technology on workers through firsthand experience.
She suffered from headaches which no doctor could cure, & moral
She suffered from headaches which no doctor could cure, & moral
suffering at the thought of the cruelties of totalitarian regimes and total
warfare. During the war, after she was dismissed from her university post
because of Germany’s racist laws, she went with her family to the US. The
winter trip to England, & her insistence on eating only the meager rations
winter trip to England, & her insistence on eating only the meager rations
the conquered French were getting, led to tuberculosis, which caused her
death.
The Iliad, or The Poem of Force was written in the summer and fall
The Iliad, or The Poem of Force was written in the summer and fall
of 1940, after the fall of France, and 1st published in late 1940 and early
1941 in Marseilles’ Cahiers du Sud. The Iliad appeared in the November
1945 issue of Politics and was later issued in pamphlet form. [Italics are
verses taken from Iliad]
I.—The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force.
verses taken from Iliad]
I.—The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force.
Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which
man’s flesh shrinks away. The human spirit is shown as modified [in nega-
tive ways] by force. For some, The Iliad is the purest & loveliest of mirrors
[of force]. Force is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a
[of force]. Force is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a
thing. “…The horses…/ longing for their noble drivers. But they on the
ground/ Lay, dearer to vultures than to their wives. No comforting fiction
intervenes; no consoling prospect of immortality. “[She prepares a bath for
Hector]/ Foolish woman! Already he lay, far from hot baths,/Slain by grey-
Hector]/ Foolish woman! Already he lay, far from hot baths,/Slain by grey-
eyed Athena, who guided Achilles’ arm.”
[There is] the force that kills, and the force that does not kill, not yet.
[There is] the force that kills, and the force that does not kill, not yet.
[It has] the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive—
a thing that has a soul. Who can say what it costs, moment by moment,
to accommodate itself to this residence, how much writhing & bending,
folding & pleading are required of it? This [helpless] person [about to die]
becomes a corpse before anybody or anything touches him. Thus spoke the
brilliant son of Priam/ In begging words. But he heard a harsh reply… Achil-
les, drawing his sword, struck/ Through the neck and breastbone. The two-
edged sword/Sunk home its full length.
II.—If a stranger, throws himself on the mercy of a warrior, he is
II.—If a stranger, throws himself on the mercy of a warrior, he is
not condemned to death; but a movement of impatience in the warrior’s
part will suffice to relieve him of his life. Alone of all living things, the
suppliant wehave just described neither quivers nor trembles. He has lost
the right to do so. [Priam] spoke. [Achilles], remembering his own father,
longed to weep/ Taking the old man’s arm, he pushed him away… Thinking
of Hector … Priam wept… But Achilles wept, now for his father, now for
Patroclus. The indefinable influence that another human being's presence
has on us isn't exercised by men whom a moment of impatience can deprive
of life, who can die before even thought has a chance to pass sentence on
them. In their presence people move about as if they were not there; they
imitate nothingness in their own person.
III.—But there are other, more unfortunate creatures who have
become things for the rest of their lives. This thing is constantly aspiring
to be a man or a woman, and never achieving it—here surely, is death
but death strung out over a whole lifetime; here, surely is life, but life
that death congeals before abolishing. This strange fate awaits the virgin,
the young wife, the baby, heir to the royal scepter.
Reflections on the future & the past are obliterated from the mind
of the captive; & memory itself barely lingers on. The misfortune of his
master, oppressor, despoiler, pillager is the only occasion on which tears
are permitted, are indeed required. Since the slave has no license to
express anything except what is pleasing to his master, it follows that
the only emotion [left] is love for his master. To lose more than the slave
does is impossible, for he loses his whole inner life. A fragment of it he
may get back if he sees a possibility of changing his fate, but this is his
only hope.
IV.—Force, in the hands of another, exercises over the soul the
same tyranny that extreme hunger does; it possesses the power of life &
death. Its rule moreover, is as cold and hard as the rule of inert matter.
Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is
to its victims; the 2nd it crushes; the 1st it intoxicates. The truth is nobody
really possesses it. Whenever [the common soldier] came upon a commo-
ner shouting out, he spoke sharply: You are weakly, cowardly and unwar-
like,/ You count for nothing, neither in battle nor in council.”
There is not a single one of the combatants who is spared the shame-
There is not a single one of the combatants who is spared the shame-
ful experience of fear; heroes quake like everybody else. A shudder of
terror ran through the Trojans, making their limbs weak;/ And Hector
himself felt his heart leap in his breast./ But he no longer had the right to
tremble or to run away … Zeus, the father on high, makes fear rise in Ajax.
He stops, overcome, puts behind him his buckler made of 7 hides,/ Trem-
bles, looks at the crowd around, like a beast. Even to Achilles the moment
comes; he too must shake and stammer with fear of a river. By its very
blindness, destiny establishes a kind of justice. Blind also is she who de-
crees to warriors punishment in kind. Ares is just, & kills those who kill.
V.—Perhaps all men, by the very act of being born, are destined to
suffer violence; yet this is a truth to which circumstance shuts men’s eyes.
The strong are, as a matter of fact, never absolutely strong, nor are the weak
absolutely weak; neither is aware of this. The man who is the possessor of
force seems to walk through a non-resistant element; nothing has the power
to interpose. Men wielding power have no suspicion of the fact that the con-
sequences of their deed will at length come home to them—they too will bow
the neck in their turn.
Those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much & are
Those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much & are
destroyed, though their own destruction seems impossible. They conclude
that destiny has given them complete license; at this point they exceed the
measure of force that is actually at their disposal. Eventually, they are ex-
posed; nothing, no shield, stands between them and tears. This retribution
[is here] under the name of Nemesis; it is the epic's soul. In Oriental coun-
tries it has lived under the name Karma. The West has lost it, and no longer
has a word to express it. We are only geometrician of matter; the Greeks
were geometrician in apprenticeship to virtue.
VI-VII.—The progress of the war in the Iliad is simply a game of
VI-VII.—The progress of the war in the Iliad is simply a game of
seesaw. The victor of the moment forgets to treat victory as transitory. [Hec-
tor swings from despair and wishing death before seeing his wife’s captivity,
to wishing to wound every Greek as a reminder of the folly of attacking
Troy, back to actual humiliating defeat and retreat, & again back the same
day to put the Greeks to flight and kill Patroclus].
The next day Hector is lost. [As death by Achilles approaches, he
The next day Hector is lost. [As death by Achilles approaches, he
says]: I fear to hear from someone far less brave than I: “Hector, trusting
his own strength too far, has ruined his people.” [He then turns & runs, is
caught & makes a vain plea for his life]. The auditors of the Iliad knew that
the death of Hector would be a brief joy to Achilles, the death of Achilles
but a brief joy to the Trojans, & Troy’s destruction but a brief joy to the
Achaeans.
Thus violence obliterates anybody who feels its touch, [conqueror as
Thus violence obliterates anybody who feels its touch, [conqueror as
well as conquered]. A moderate use of force, which alone would enable man
to escape being enmeshed in its machinery, would require superhuman
virtue, which is as rare as dignity in weakness. Man dashes to the extremes
of force as to an irresistible temptation. The voice of reason is occasionally
heard in the Iliad, but words of reason drop into the void. Failing everything
else, there is always a god handy to advise him to be unreasonable, [and a
resignation to their fate].
VIII.—Unless your spirit has been conquered in advance by the repu-
tation of the enemy, you always feel yourself to be much stronger than any-
body who is not there. War’s necessity is terrible, altogether different in kind
from the necessity of peace. So terrible is it that the human spirit will not
submit to it so long as it can possibly escape. After long days empty of
submit to it so long as it can possibly escape. After long days empty of
necessity, danger then becomes an abstraction; the lives you destroy like
toys broken by a child. With the majority of combatants this state of mind
does not persist.
Soon there comes a day when fear, defeat, or a death touches the
warrior’s spirit. Once you acknowledge death to be a practical possibility,
the thought of it becomes unendurable, except in flashes. The mind, [when
faced with death every day], is strung up to a pitch that it can stand only for
a short time. Each day the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought can't
journey through time without meeting death. The mind has lost all capacity
to so much as look outward, as it is completely absorbed in doing itself vio-
lence.
Deliverance appears to the soul in an extreme aspect of destruction.
The idea that an unlimited effort should bring in only a limited profit or no
profit is terribly painful. The only remedy the soul can imagine is the destruc-
tion of the enemy. Despair drives one on toward death, on the one hand, &
slaughter on the other. The man possessed by this 2-fold need for death
belongs to a different race from the race of the living.
What echo can the timid hopes of life strike in such a heart?
What echo can the timid hopes of life strike in such a heart?
[Pleas for pity to such a man fall on deaf ears. He has already resigned his
victim and himself to the inevitability of death]. Come friend, you too
must die. Why make a fuss of it?... Even I, like you, must some day en-
counter my fate, The hour when some arms-bearing warrior will kill me.
To respect life in somebody else when you have had to castrate yourself of
all yearning for it demands a truly heartbreaking exertion of the powers
of generosity. How many men do we know in several thousand years
of history who have displayed such god-like generosity [and mercy]?
of history who have displayed such god-like generosity [and mercy]?
Both conquering soldier and slave become things; both experience force’s
inevitable effects: they become deaf and dumb.
IX-X.—Such is the nature of force. Its power of converting a man
IX-X.—Such is the nature of force. Its power of converting a man
into a thing is a double one, and in its application double-edged; those who
use it and those who endure it are turned to stone. Battles are fought and
decided by men who have undergone a transformation, who have dropped
into inert matter, pure passivity, or into blind force, pure momentum. Iliad’s
into inert matter, pure passivity, or into blind force, pure momentum. Iliad’s
similes liken warriors to either fire, flood, wind, wild beasts, or frightened
animals, trees, water, sand, anything affected by natural disasters. The art
of war is simply the art of producing such transformations. The petrifying
quality of force, 2-fold always, is essential to its nature; and a soul which
quality of force, 2-fold always, is essential to its nature; and a soul which
has entered the province of force will not escape this except by a miracle.
The conqueror’s wantonness, the soldier’s despair, the slave’s oblite-
The conqueror’s wantonness, the soldier’s despair, the slave’s oblite-
ration, the wholesale slaughter—all these elements combine in Iliad to
make a picture of uniform horror, of which force is the sole hero. A mono-
tonous desolation would result were it not for those few luminous moments
of love and courage, when man possesses his soul, scattered here & there
of love and courage, when man possesses his soul, scattered here & there
throughout the poem. Dear husband, you died young, and left me your
widow/alone in the palace. Our child is still tiny… not in your bed did you
die, holding my hand/ And speaking prudent words which forever… might
live in my memory.
The purest triumph of love is the friendship that floods the hearts
live in my memory.
The purest triumph of love is the friendship that floods the hearts
of mortal enemies. Then Dardanian Priam fell to admiring Achilles…In
his turn Dardanian Priam was admired by Achilles. Moments of grace are
rare in the Iliad; they are enough to make us feel with sharp regret what it
is that violence has killed & will kill again.
XI-XIII.—Never does the poem’s tone lose its coloring of incur-
XI-XIII.—Never does the poem’s tone lose its coloring of incur-
able bitterness; never does the bitterness drop into lamentation. Nothing
precious is scorned. Victors and vanquished are brought equally near us.
The whole Iliad is brought under the shadow the greatest calamity the
human race can experience—the destruction of a city. Whatever isn't
war, what war destroys or threatens, the Iliad wraps in poetry; the realities
of war, never. The cold brutality of the deeds of war is left undisguised.
The gods determine with sovereign authority victory and defeat, their only
motives, caprice and malice. The warriors, reduced to beasts or things, can
inspire only regret that men are capable of being so transformed.
If one believes that 80 years after the fall of Troy, the Achaeans in
If one believes that 80 years after the fall of Troy, the Achaeans in
their turn were conquered, one may ask whether these songs are not the
song of a conquered people, of whom a few went into exile. [The exiled
& conquered Greeks] saw their own image both in the conquerors, who
had been their fathers and in the conquered, whose misery was like their
own. Looking at it as conquered and conquerors simultaneously, they
perceived what neither conqueror nor conquered ever saw for both were
blinded.
The Iliad’s bitterness is the only justifiable bitterness, for it springs
The Iliad’s bitterness is the only justifiable bitterness, for it springs
rom the subjection of the human spirit to force. Such is the spirit of the
only true epic the Occident possesses. [Other lengthy Greek works are
merely good imitations of it]. The French chanson de geste lacks the
Iliad’s sense of equity. The tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles, is the true
continuation of the epic. Here, force appears in its coldness and hardness,
always attended by effects from those whose fatality neither those who
use it nor those who suffer it can escape.
The Gospels are the last marvelous expression of the Greek genius
The Gospels are the last marvelous expression of the Greek genius
as the Iliad is the 1st. Here, human suffering is laid bare, and we see it in
a being who is at once divine & human. The sense of human misery gives
the Gospel that accent of simplicity that is the mark of the Greek genius.
The sense of human misery is a pre-condition of justice and love. Only
one who has measured the dominion of force, & knows how not to respect
it, is capable of love and justice.
XIV.—[The relations between the human soul, destiny & merciless
XIV.—[The relations between the human soul, destiny & merciless
necessity] are fraught with temptations to false hood, temptations that are
enhanced by pride, by shame, by hatred, contempt, indifference, by the will
to oblivion or to ignorance. The Greeks, generally speaking, were endowed
with spiritual force that allowed them to avoid self-deception, [& gain luci-
dity, purity, & simplicity]. Once Greece was destroyed, nothing remained
of this spirit but pale reflections.
Both the Romans & the Hebrews believed themselves to be exempt
from the misery that is the common human lot, [chosen and superior, the
Romans through conquest and destiny, the Hebrews through obedience to]
their God who exalted them. No text of the Old Testament strikes a note
comparable to the note heard in the Greek epic, unless it be certain parts
of the book of Job. [Christians should understand] that the only people who
can [seem to have] risen to a higher plain, who seem superior to ordinary
human misery, are people resorting to illusion, exaltation, fanaticism, to
conceal the harshness of destiny from their own eyes.
Christian tradition can only rarely recover that simplicity that renders
so poignant the story of the Passion. In spite of the Renaissance’s brief
intoxication by Greek literature, in 20 centuries there has been no revival
of Greek genius. [The 17th century] took the opposite view from the epic
period; it only acknowledged human suffering in the context of love, swa-
thing with glory the effects of force in war and politics. Perhaps Europeans
will rediscover the epic genius, when they learn that there is no refuge from
fate, learn not to admire force, not to hate the enemy, nor to scorn the unfor-
tunate. How soon this will happen is another question.
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92. An inward Legacy: Selections from Letters to his Friends (by
Forbes Robinson; 1956)
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92. An inward Legacy: Selections from Letters to his Friends (by
Forbes Robinson; 1956)
INTRODUCTION [About Author & Letters]—[Forbes Robinson was the William Law, Brother Lawrence, or Thomas Kelly for his generation]. Born in a Somerset vicarage in 1867 into a family of 13 children, Robinson’s short life was centered at Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow at Christ’s College in 1896 & died 8 years later at the age of 37. He was a man of prayer, a prophet of loving concern, a student of holy obedience. A friend has suggested to me that these letters might be more acceptable to us today if they were 200 years old instead of 50. 2 or 3 centuries work wonders for some people.
Let him speak to us just as he is. He stands in one particular tradition, nourished by one particular cultus, but always working his way sincerely and bravely toward the universal ground of inward truth. He speaks of the trinity, but we can feel his goal of dwelling in the living truth which unites God’s various dispensations & revealings. Likewise he seeks the interior meaning of all sacraments. Here is the ecumenical ground our generation is seeking. His writings are fragmentary as passages from letters are apt to be, but there runs through them an inward, [binding] unity—the force of Grace as received into his own life. GILBERT KILPACK
It takes time to make a saint. We can't trust God too much. If we forget our self, He will see that our truest self is ultimately realized.
Pray to Him that the outward & visible may ever more and more be an expression of something inward & unseen & spiritual. For beauty, grace, intel- lect, everything is doomed unless it is sacramental—unless it draws its life from God below, unless it lives but to testify of him who is.” Forbes Robinson
WHEN GOD WISHED TO REDEEM MAN, He did it from the inside. If we want to look at others from the inside, we must love, love the Christ, the Spirit in them. We must be right, inside ourselves; [none of us are]. There is in us a Son who will make us true sons, a Brother who will teach us to be bro- thers, a Human Being who will show us what is in all human beings; a Love who will teach us what we think we know. What is the difference between good & bad men? The best men say they are possessed by faith & love; they yield to the Spirit. It's in them, not of them, not belonging to them. God is in all detail; not to think of Him is not to understand that detail. Every detail is the expression of a Person.
I HAVE MORE & MORE come to the conclusion that the only reality underlying & explaining the world must be personal. All my ideas of justice & purity & goodness are bound up with persons. The world & the things [& we who are] in it are only real in so far as they & we are thoughts of God. I cannot help feeling that the persons who attract me in a wonderful way are a kind of faint picture of One better than all of them. I believe that we are intended to rise from them to Him who made them. If we stop short with creatures, we lower ourselves and them. If we rise from them to the Personal Being, we see more in them than we ever saw before.
Life is a circle whose center is God. We are unconnected with each other, but connected with the center. The nearer the center, the nearer we get to each other. The more truly we understand persons, the more we shall find they are spirits. God is Three Persons in One. I try to get closer to those I love, yet something, someone is keeping us apart. It's a malicious, a devilish person. I look out on life; again & again death, & someone worse than death is sepa- rating us, misinterpreting motives, keeping people apart.
Our life is a copy; God’s life is the original. The Deity's unity is a pledge of humanity's unity. The more we make our life like the original the more shall we realize what we long to realize—truer, deeper, more eternal unity. We're not trying to be one, we are one. Others live over their life again in us, and we are living our lives in other people. When I almost stop thinking, & listen, I am quite sure that a Personal Being comes to me, & brings some of His own life to flow into my life; [those who live in Him come too]. If I let them, they live their lives in my life, making me what I should not be without them.
What I have written is not a mere philosophy of life; it is the only thing which I intensely long to realize; life is love; love is life. Love for one person, if, it be true [unselfish] love, leads you at once to God, for “God is Love.” As we, love God is there; we see God, we are in God. We are led from unselfish love on earth to that unselfish family life of Three in One in heaven; we are led on to Him in whose image we are made and love in.
IT IS VERY CURIOUS—how very, very few people, if any, you would deliberately wish to change into if you could. Very few of us wish to lose “me”; most of us perhaps never will. It is a good thing to think that whatever we do is done for eternity, is part of ourselves & of others—that we live on in others. We are playing with big issues: we call them small & secular, we treat them as such—yet every speck of dust is big with infinity. Correct your thoughts to fit in with His thoughts, not His thoughts to fit in with your thoughts.
I HAVE BEEN THINKING LATELY of God’s life of self-sacrifice. I suppose that is why He can enter our lives. We are made in His image— made to go out of self, and find our self by losing it. Each time we go out, and enter another “ego,” we return the richer for our sacrifice. When the other “ego” is most unlike our own, when the sacrifice is great, if we would [totally adopt the ego’s perceptions and perspective], then is the time when we are peculiarly rewarded for our pains. Our consciousness is larger, more human, more divine than before.
OH, IF BREAD & WINE & WATER are capable of being trans- formed into the highest means of grace & hopes of glory; may not living human persons be sacraments as well? [Making human life a sacrament too brings [all] into relation with real life, & transforms poor magical abstrac- tions into eternal realities. Thank God when you see a good, beautiful, man or woman, a pure & simple family. For beauty, grace, intellect, everything is doomed, unless it is sacramental, unless it lives to testify of Him who is.
One who is beautiful & who knows God, leaves the blessing of such beauty to descendants who are little conscious of their beauty’s source, who have little thought of God. How can a flirt exist when beauty should surely be a sign not of unspirituality, but of the Supreme? The answer lies in the sacraments. They are a pledge that someday the outward and visible shall correspond to the inward & invisible. When you feel that every one is a hypo- crite, & you are the worst of all, kneel down & pray that all you love may enter more into the [Communion] service's meaning, that they too may flee from self to One who is stronger than self. All life is a sacrament.
God has an inheritance for us to be saints. It is our selfishness & stupi- dity that prevents us recognizing the fact. We want to be able to enter into the meaning of what we see without becoming slaves of the visible & the finite. As we see Christ in men & men in Christ—we shall be more stable, less childish, less fickle. We never go deep enough into life; we must get into its heart. The moment we see anyone whose [qualities] attract us, we ought to pray for that person, to thank God for the manifestation of His character, which we see as in a riddle.
Then we shall be prepared to realize deeper relationships. Think what it is to see a relationship in God, to see it existing there in His life, as His thought, long, long before we were born. [All our] old relationships seem so common & natural, & yet they are intensely awful & sacred and mysterious. & then think what it is to see God in them. This is bringing heaven down to earth, the holy city coming down from heaven. Around us—nay in us—are others, some whom we can see, some we cannot, all one, one, forever one, working out one big purpose.
LIFE IS LARGE, & I AM FEARFUL, lest I should exclude as wrong some elements which are God-given. We have to bring our affections and our longing for beauty to their source that He may interpret them. I scarcely yet understand anything about the meaning of Beauty. If I see human beauty, I feel that I'm on holy ground. I feel that I have a duty in return for the revelation that has been given. The connection [of beauty and holiness is more perfect in nature; in man something has occurred, something anomalous, which mars the whole.
I HAVE BEEN THINKING TODAY of “I no longer call you slaves …but I have called you friend.” We can't understand the riddle of life, the necessity of all the details in redemption's great scheme, the reasons for certain means of grace, the real significance of the hope for glory while we are still slaves. Be- come a friend of a man & all is changed. Each act in his life, each, thought in his life each word from his lips hasn't ceased to be a problem but there must be a purpose running through the whole.
So too, become a friend of Him who alone is, & all is changed. Gradually, perhaps painfully, as we become like little children, the meaning of the whole dawns upon us. We only see one side of him ever, and the rest is only known to God. Yet we do know in part, & we are content to know no more. What we know is good; what we do not know must also be good.
We shall learn that His methods are simpler and better than ours, that His thoughts are surer, deeper, higher than all our schemes & plans. God Him- self provides institutions & customs, & had waited until I was old enough to learn their use and to bless Him as I used them. We must be the friends of Jesus Christ before we understand His life now upon earth. Sometimes I see how some men who are infinitely nobler and better than I are struggling to find the Truth. I know that I hold an advanced book in God’s great school in trust for them, that as I learn I must live out the truth, & teach as well as learn from them. Why was I entrusted with truth? Why can't I communicate it? Such unsolved problems do stir me up from my natural laziness, & make me try to develop all my faculties in due proportion in the service of Him.
If you take my advice you will try to get a certain amount of time alone with yourself. [Then] we just see how much we really believe, how much is mere enthusiasm excited at the moment. Then we see how poor, hollow & unloving we are. This hollowness, this unloving void can only be filled with Him who fills all in all. If we are ever to be or to do anything, if we are ever to be full of deep, permanent, rational enthusiasm, we must know & [be alone with God]. Let us learn to make every thought of admiration & love a kind of prayer of intercession & thanksgiving. Thus human love will correct itself with, & find its root in, Divine love.
THERE ARE IN EVERY LIFE drawbacks & discouragements, for we live by faith & not by sight; faith must be perfected in the midst of perplexities and contradictions. I think there will be more need of faith hereafter than we usually think. I imagine that the riddles of life will still need faith for their solu- tion hereafter. The faith perfected in the mists of life will, in eternity's sunshine, see deeper into the meaning of events.
It's easier to cast off several definite bad habits, clearly inconsistent with the ideal at first, than to perfect self-sacrifice, humility & self-discipline. We are advancing though we know it not. I often think of God's great unsatisfied heart, & then I think of this poor unsatisfied heart made in His image. I feel that He understands me, & that I understand Him better than I used to do, before this terrible hunger of love began.
THE MORE HE TRIES YOU BY HIS SILENCE, the greater to my mind is proof that He believes in you. He knows you will come through. A man who had lived in the presence of God for years says: These surface troubles come & go,/Like rufflings of the sea;/The deeper depth is out of reach/To all, my God, but Thee. I believe in beginning by praying for what is easiest. The distress occasioned by wandering thoughts, & the attempt to trace the stages by which they wandered, I regard as the devil’s temptations.
I bring the whole contradictory, weary & unintelligible mass of my sins to God, & leave them with Him. Prayer often renewed must at length attain its end. He understands our weakness & weariness. He knows what loneliness & sad- ness mean. l And He is not extreme to mark what we do amiss. It may be that even in the mist we had gone further than we thought.
You will find that one [friend] understands one side, another appreciates another side. There are sides of our being which no one but God seems to be able to apprehend. He works slowly in nature, and I'm not surprised if human nature is more stubborn material for Him to work upon. He doesn't let us see many rsults, just enough to help us go forward. Remember Kant’s maxim: “Treat humanity whether in thy self or in another, always as an end, not simply as a means. Your influence, your life, your all, depends on prayer.
Just try to pray for some one person committed to your charge; you will begin really to love him. It is quite worth your while to take a day off sometime, & to force yourself to pray. It will be the best day’s work you have ever done in your life. It is a marvelous thought that God can reveal Himself to man—even primitive man. It is good for us as children to read these stories to realize that heaven is very near to earth. [As adults we] read them again & realize that heaven is even nearer earth than we thought as children. The child should surely be the father of the man.
I USE MY REASON/I AM SLOW TO SUGGEST—I USE MY REASON, but I am more than half affection, & it is that which helps me most. I don't pray so much because my reason bids me as because my affection forces me. I ask Him to develop & satisfy good, & to exterminate evil. I cannot help trusting Him.
I AM SLOW TO SUGGEST to another that what seems bad luck is in reality God's voice making itself felt in one’s busy life, calling him to fuller sacri- fice. Yet the absence of human help is not accidental. It must be designed, in order that we may learn to fall back on the everlasting arms. As I think over [Christ's teachings], I find that I have to revise my moral arithmetic, change my standard, revise more ideas of great and little, happy & misery, importance & insignificance. God comes unutterably near in trouble. If we can only get nearer to God, we shall get nearer to those we love, for they too are in God.
One sees one’s life as a whole, when one is helpless, [in pain], & can do nothing; the whole looks very poor & mean. But you still can make the future better, more honest, more noble than the past. I felt so selfish and so surprised at the goodness they showed. I saw something of pain's mystery. My conso- lation was that it is not necessarily a sign of God’s displeasure. If one volunta- rily says, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” then one is entering into the highest life, & the pain becomes a new method of serving and knowing God.
There's no time on a sickbed for praying or thinking much of God unless one is used to doing so in health. I comforted myself with the thought that in the highest Life ever seen on earth, there was a full measure of spiritual, men- tal, & physical pain. When one accepted with faith certain suffering, one was in sympathy with the will of the universe, “working together with God” in some mysterious way. Jesus came, showing us that Heaven is on our side in wrest ling with all that deforms and degrades human nature.
LIFE IS SACRIFICE, RENUNCIATION/THE FACT THAT YOU HAVE— LIFE IS SACRIFICE, RENUNCIATION: true life is dependence on God. We must learn that our wills are ours to make them God’s; that if we have a hope or thought which He doesn’t inspire, which true humanity can’t share, the hope & thought are wrong.
THE FACT THAT YOU HAVE not all the sympathy, manly help & advice that you wish for, will I trust, force you to depend with simpler confidence upon the unchanging Ground of all human sympathy. [I hope that] you will grasp the truth that God uses the sin of this world as an instrument in the education of His people.
Our own puny individualistic life of morbid self-consciousness & sensi- bility must be transformed by the fuller, Universal Life in which all may have a share; and thus we shall come think less of ourselves and what others think of us. Because the life there manifested is divine as well as human, we shall rea- lize also with fuller force what it is to be a child of a Father who is in heaven Life is life in so far as it is unselfish. May He who has called us and given to us all our privileges teach us to live out that which we know & believe.
HE TOOK MANHOOD/I FOUND WALKING/GREEK HISTORY WAS SHORT—HE TOOK MANHOOD in its weakness and strength—up into God. He was tempted. That thought helps me immensely. Foul thoughts only be- come sins when entertained as welcome guests. Human life is based on faith. If we let this idea into our minds Christ’s temptations become more real; they are temptations to faithlessness.
I FOUND WALKING a pleasant change after reading philosophy. I feel now more than ever how we can’t divide ourselves into watertight compart- ments, & think of reason, will, & feeling as separate things, lying side by side. In actual life you never find one without the other. Thought requires attention, will requires desire [feeling, & learning what our feelings are teaching requires thought]. Reason, will & feeling are all involved in the faith of a poor cottager, more so in a thoughtful man.
GREEK HISTORY WAS SHORT compared with the Hebrew; I suppose because intellectual & artistic ideals are more easily realized than ethical & religious. It takes time to make a saint. We can't trust God too much. If we forget our self, He will see that our truest self is ultimately realized.
About the Author—Howard & Anna Brinton arrived at Pendle Hill in
1936's summer with a solid background of academic achievement at the col-
leges of Mills & Earlham, & became co-directors of a new educational enter
prise, a Quaker fusion of school & community. They retired in the 1950s &
lived on cam-pus as Directors Emeriti. Anna died in 1969; Howard continued
to lecture, write, & simply be; he died in 1973
Quakerism and Christianity—Three types of relationship can be
thought of as existing between Christianity in general and the non-Christian
religions: [Christian monopoly; equality of great world religions; Christianity
as truest religion (but no monopoly on truth). All three of these positions have
been held by some members of the Society of Friends; the majority have ad-
hered to the third position. “Quakerism” means those beliefs and practices
accepted during the first two centuries of Quaker history (1650-1870). Two-
thirds of the American Friends adopted Protestant characteristics in the third
century.
Theological [and practical] differences helped to cause separation in
Theological [and practical] differences helped to cause separation in
American Quakerism in the 1800s; spiritual life was too low to achieve unity
in diversity. Early Quakerism [resisted the prevailing Protestant, Calvinistic
definition of Christianity]. The [still-active] Spirit which produced the Scrip-
ture took precedence over the Scripture. The Christ Within, whom men knew
by experience, was more significant in overcoming evil in themselves than the
Christ they knew through the book. In silent worship they found the Christ
Within, the saving power which regenerates, if man permits it to operate.
The gospel of John permits both a mystical religion and a historical
The gospel of John permits both a mystical religion and a historical
religion; one can choose both or either. Because he is the Way [not the goal]
we can't expect the whole truth at once. Because he is the Truth he will reveal
deeper insights into the Truth. Because he is the Life he can be known through
life and not wholly apprehended through concepts or words.
Worship, a Meeting Point—The sense of Divine Presence felt in the
Worship, a Meeting Point—The sense of Divine Presence felt in the
silence of a waiting worship is beyond expression in words, but it may result
in the feeling that some act is required of the worshiper such as speaking in
the meeting for worship itself or carrying out some duty or concern elsewhere.
Spiritual exercise, carried on in silence, is more characteristic of non-Chris-
tian religions than of most forms of Christianity.
Silent worship provides a basis of unity. There is a philosophical basis
for this concept which appears in every religion. In Quaker thought it is the
same Light shining in all; in Hindu Vedanta it is the universal Self; in Maha-
yana Buddhism it is the same Buddha nature in all living beings. Christian
theology, so far as it follows the Hellenic tradition, endangers individuality,
for in union the human is merged into the Divine.
Selfishness builds a wall between man and the world. Man thinks this
wall protects him but actually it imprisons him. He can overcome this
estrangement [and distance] through worship or meditation in which he con-
sciously seeks union with the Divine through the Divine Life's upward pull.
The Universality of the Inward Light—God & not a person in a
Trinity, has shone in every man of every race & religion from the beginning,
though it has generally been obscured by sin, ignorance, and weakness; the
light is never wholly obscured. The more learned Friends not only quote
Scripture, but also the Church Fathers to support their belief that there is in
all men a Light which is sufficient for their salvation.
The doctrine that the Light shone into men before the coming of Christ in the flesh was called Gentile Divinity, which is also the title of a book by the Quaker, John Bockett. For William Penn “Christ was before the law, under the law, with the prophets, but never so revealed as in that holy manhood.” Qua- kers discovered that the divine & the human were not so unrelated as to be in- capable of some degree of union with each other.
The attitude of Friends toward Non-Christians—The world's condi- tion at the present time requires a more humble attitude on the part of the “exclusive” religions. The so-called “heathen world” was made up of [Islam]
in the East & American Indians in the West. [Islam was more accepting of
Quaker practices and character than of other forms of Christianity]. Relations
with the American Indians were also based on the principle of the universality
of the Light. [Quakers found & noted the agreement in practice & philosophy
with the American Indians of the colonies and further west].
In such attitudes as these toward non-Christians, Friends followed
Paul's example when he said to the Athenians “Whom therefore ye ignorantly
worship, Him I declare unto you.” George Fox [said]: “Get the Turks’ &
Moors’ language that you might be the more enabled to direct them to the
Grace and Spirit of God in them which they have from God, in their hearts.”
Similarities Between Quakerism & The Non-Christian Religions
(Mysticism & Affinity with Science)—No general statement regarding the
religion of over 100,000,000 human beings is completely true even with ex-
ceptions noted. In Hinduism and Buddhism there are no definite standards of
orthodoxy or generally accepted articles of faith. The great religions’ mystical
sects show more similarities to Quakerism than do other sects.
The Society of Friends’ vocal ministry is based on prophetism (God using a human being as God’s instrument in communicating Truth). The term “mysticism” can be applied to that religion which seeks, in silent worship to attain direct contact with the Divine. [Rather than “worship,” Friends] preferred the expression “to wait upon the Lord.” “Meditation” may include prayer, worship, contemplation, and adoration when these are done in silence.
The Sufis [Islam] seek mystical knowledge of God and union with him.
The Taoist mystic seeks union with the Tao (Way of the Universe). The Hindu
Bhagavad Gita describes 3 roads to mystic union: jnana yoga; bhakti yoga;
karma yoga. Jnana yoga begins with elaborate physical and moral exercises &
ends with mental concentration exercises; the guidance of a guru is essential.
By the 2nd road, bhakti yoga, the mystic seeks through prayer and devotion a union of love & will with the human being whom he reverences as an incarnation of God. The ultimate goal is complete identity with Divine Reality; all sense of self is lost. The Christian may be said to follow a path like bhakti yoga. Karma yoga is the way of works without attachment to results. If good works are closely tied to results, they bind the devotee to this world of pain & trouble, instead of freeing him.
Buddhism is closer to Quakerism than is Hinduism because it isn't as
dependent on ascetic denial of the world. In northern Buddhism, the saint or
Bodhisattva can be appealed to for help. The Japanese Buddhism's Shinshu
sect is based on the salvation doctrine through faith in Amida Buddha (Buddha
of Infinite Light). Zen Buddhism is the most similar to Quakerism. In the Zen
meeting, one may retire to a teacher who sits in his study nearby.
Like Quakerism, Zen seeks to quiet the surface or mind’s intellectual process so that the meditator can go beyond these to an experience which can't be described in concepts. Unlike Quakerism Zen provides forms & ima- ges for those who need them; Zen seek not God or Christ but “knowledge of one’s true nature.” Zen Buddhism endeavors to place the pupil in a state of mind and body where they will discover the truth for themselves.
In Hindu, Buddhist, or Taoist temples & in Shinto shrines the worshi-
per bows his head in silent prayer. The immediate experience of the Divine or
Absolute or True as distinguished from the relative world of sense and appear-
ance is described similarly in all religions. True religion is more than mysti-
cism. In every religion, traditional, historical, and rational elements are essen-
tial. For the true mystic of any religion the ultimate and the provisional, the
infinite and the finite, the end and the means are never separate, though dis-
tinguished in thought. The truly enlightened person, sees the infinite in the
finite, the divine in the human, the absolute whole in the fragment.
Quakerism has a close similarity of its standard of truth with that of
Quakerism has a close similarity of its standard of truth with that of
science. Both science & Quakerism lay primary emphasis on direct experience
rather than on authority, though neither ignores the importance of the past ex-
experience of those who have made great discoveries as a necessary guide &
check on present experience. A religion which neither is dependent nor ignores
tradition and insight can be welcomed by the scientifically minded.
Detachment from Result—When Quakers argue upon political ques-
Detachment from Result—When Quakers argue upon political ques-
tions, they reason upon principles & not consequences. The true Christian is
“in the world but not of it” [i.e.] he is not concerned with conventional stan-
standards of success. In Hindu religion, Krishna says: “Let the work itself be
thy charge, but never the fruit . . . yet be not inclined to inaction.” In Chinese
Taoism, in its doctrine of Wei Wu Wei, [there is] action with effortless sponta-
neity without concern for results or for conformity to some convention of be-
havior. The Buddhist seeks to live in the present & eternity rather than in the
past and future. Quaker Journal writers often succeed in following what he
believes to be the spirit’s immediate guidance, regardless of present obstacles,
past events or results.
Quietism, the openness to immediate impressions from the Spirit, en-
Quietism, the openness to immediate impressions from the Spirit, en-
abled men and women to undertake tasks which reason and prudence would
have declared impossible. Taoist or Buddhist quietism does not result in as
vigorous an effort to reform existing abuses as does Quaker quietism. Worship
of God, the highest act of which man is capable, is not dependent for its value
on results.
Pacifism—All the texts of pacifism can be found in the sacred litera-
ture of the religions of Asia, including Christianity. All great religions go fur-
ther and condemn anger, hatred, & all the causes of violence. Christians who
hold that the words of Christ should be their practical guide to behavior can
find in the non-Christian religions many adherents with whom they can fel-
lowship in pacifist belief and practice.
Perfectionism—A doctrine which Quakerism shares with Hinduism & Buddhism is sometimes called “perfectionism,” [i.e. thinking] that man can
Perfectionism—A doctrine which Quakerism shares with Hinduism & Buddhism is sometimes called “perfectionism,” [i.e. thinking] that man can
obtain through religion a sense of absence of guilt and a resulting peace and
serenity, [depending on the] willingness to accept and obey inwardly revealed
Divine requirements. Perfection in this sense doesn't mean the end of spiritual
growth; it requires further attainment.
Oriental religions hold that man can in his human life, reach a state
of enlightenment or perfection. The search for enlightenment’s final stage in Hinduism and Buddhism is carried out by specialists who withdraw from the world in order to devote their life to obtaining the goal; Quakers distrust all forms of professionalism & specialization in religion. Those who fall short of the Hindu/Buddhist goal in this life will have opportunities in subsequent incarnations.
Some differences between Quakerism & other religions—Unlike the
Oriental religions, which are not based on history, Christianity derives from a
crucial historical event. The Light within is identified by Quakerism with the
Divine Spirit incarnated in the historic Jesus. We mean not only the historic
Jesus, but the Eternal Christ, enlightening all. In accepting Jesus as the “Word
made flesh” the Society of Friends didn't, for the most part, adopt a Trinitarian
or Unitarian dogma. Christ revealed not only the nature of God, but also the
nature of man.
In the Bhagavad Gita (Hindu), the Saddharma-pundarika (Lotus Scrip-
In the Bhagavad Gita (Hindu), the Saddharma-pundarika (Lotus Scrip-
ture of Buddhism), and the Gospel of John, the Divine Life or Truth or Light
becomes embodied in a man; the Gita has Krishna, the Lotus Scripture has Go-
tama Sakyamuni, & the Gospel has Jesus, the Christ. They were all too humble
to have made these claims themselves. Quakers recognize that many people
receive the light of God through other-shaped windows and recognize it as the
same light and the same God. But we can’t afford to dissociate ourselves from
Christ in any way.
Non-Christian religions do not have the concept of a God-indwelt society
Non-Christian religions do not have the concept of a God-indwelt society
united into an organic whole by a divine spirit within as the soul unites a body.
Quakerism holds to the ideal of the Church as the Kingdom of God on earth,
functioning as a divine-human society, a doctrine which is social as well as
religious and which has a powerful, ethical drive. Albert Schweitzer says that
the dualism of Christianity deprives it of a consistent philosophical or theologi-
cal system but gives it moral power. Kaka Kalelkar makes an interesting sug-
gestion. Each of the great living religions' scriptures could be considered in a
a sense an Old Testament to which might be added specific Christian doctrine.
Christianity could build on the truths of other religions.
By the Quaker view of fixing attention on the good rather than on the
evil, the evil may be weakened and the good raised up. The higher forms of
Oriental religion arose out of contemplation of a universe which is ethically
neutral, while Christianity arose out of contemplation of a person whose will
is to do good. The Christian social dynamic is an important contribution which
Christianity can give and has given to other religions. The techniques of medi-
tation so carefully worked out in Hinduism and Buddhism contain suggestions
for those who are able to use them. For either East or West it is usually better
to graft a new insight onto the inherited religion than to uproot their own tradi-
tion and plant an alien seed.
The Area of Cooperation—The religions of the world, by concentra-
The Area of Cooperation—The religions of the world, by concentra-
ting on what they have in common, could work together without compromising
the peculiar tenets which distinguish them from one another. The common
enemy of all religion today is materialism (the belief that man is essentially a
biological mechanism, that he exists for the satisfaction of desires arising out
of bodily wants) with its resulting secularism.
The spirit of our age, with its dependence on science, is primarily con-
cerned with means rather than meaning, with methods rather than goals. The
East is now seeking to adopt Western science & industry in order to enjoy the
same material comforts as the West. When not supplemented by religion, sci-
entific method is apt to give rise to scientific materialism. [The denial of spiri- tual life is not a product of science, but of scientific materialism].
Christian mysticism may have fallen behind that of the other great
religion because Christianity has become absorbed in the activist and extrovert
tendencies of Western culture. After a century of enthusiastic expansion the
Society of Friends was forced by the activist & non-mystical spirit of the time
to retreat behind the walls of a rigid discipline. As a form of Christianity which
contains so many elements common to all the great religions, Quakerism may
[now] play a vital role in helping men to be more aware of their true nature and
destiny.
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94. Loyalty by Oath: an essay on the extortion of love (by Hallock B. Hoffman; 1957)
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94. Loyalty by Oath: an essay on the extortion of love (by Hallock B. Hoffman; 1957)
[About the Author]—Hallock Hoffman is a member of Orange Grove
Meeting in Pasadena, California. He has taught at Kenyon College, lectured
at Occident College, served in the U.S. Air Force. He is presently Assistant to
the President of the Fund for the Republic, [a civil rights & liberties defense
fund].
[Introduction]—Nothing is more mysterious than loyalty. To be loyal is
to love, to be true to something. If a man could know even himself, & the frame
of his own love & loyalty, he would know more than most of us. Why not ask
people what they believe in & don’t believe in, if you can't trust them un-
less you know? So we come to oaths. Oaths are old; they have been seized
upon by men trying [be certain about trusting other men]. They have been used
by kings & robbers, democrats & oligarchs, societies open & secret; but they
never work. They have never guaranteed loyalty, or protected anyone from
disloyalty. They are contrary to human nature.
THE REPETITIONS OF HISTORY/THE POWERS OF DARKNESS— Henry VIII had Parliament pass “An Act for Establishment of the King’s
THE REPETITIONS OF HISTORY/THE POWERS OF DARKNESS— Henry VIII had Parliament pass “An Act for Establishment of the King’s
Succession.” This act validated his marriage with Anne Boleyn and limited the
heirs to her children by him. The oath was supposed to being about an abrupt
& radical shift in men’s thoughts & loyalties. The oath was elaborate & sought
to cancel out any contradicting oaths and cover all contingencies; [oath-takers
were to swear on] “God, all Sayntes & the Holye Evangelystes.” A loyalty oath
declares intent to fulfill a duty or promise; it is disavowal of any conflicting
power or opinion; it is forswearing other promises. He must call upon frighte-
ning and potent forces and penalties to witness his declaration.
Henry VIII made the penalty for false swearing the same as that for
treason. The Papists argued that one could swear the King’s oaths including
the promise of disloyalty to the Pope, provided one did so in a proper state
of mind. In 1672, an “Act” was passed with a new oath forswearing tran-
substantiation, an essential Catholic belief, & giving up any right to dispen-
sation. It was this kind of oath that George Fox & William Penn refused to
take. The higher loyalty to God prohibited their unreserved loyalty to any
man. But chiefly, they wouldn't be compelled. God didn't give man the right
to extract a promise by force.
Los Angeles City, in 1948, passed an ordinance, that is a full-scale
loyalty oath, [aimed at preventing] the overthrow of the US or California
government, & the teaching or advocating the same. 15 objectors of the oath
carried their opposition to the Supreme Court, which upheld it 6-3 as within
the Constitution. [If there was knowing membership, regardless of whether
the employee’s work put him in the position of advocating & teaching or not,
& regardless of the presence or absence of intent or possibility, the State can
exact from its employees such an oath as a qualification for government
employment.
Both King Henry & the Californians want the honesty, trustworthiness,
& love of their subjects; they want to be sure of the future, & sought to elicit
them by invoking fear. Men insist on believing in the magic of fear, despite the
steady failure of fear to promote trust or truth. [As to truth], the men’s reality
is never more than partially described. Our faculties for perceiving what men
are [lacks clarity], yet men must act, & they must act in doubt.
CURING DOUBT: THE LURE OF MAGIC/THE FEAR OF JUSTICE—
CURING DOUBT: THE LURE OF MAGIC/THE FEAR OF JUSTICE—
The passionate desire to know what cannot be known led to an elder
sister of science: magic. It is not excessive to equate the wish to guarantee
loyalty by oaths with a belief in magic. [An oath is an incantation, a magic
ritual] to make men fear what will happen to them when they tell lies, or go
back on their promises. In our day God is no longer widely feared & the men
who would awe their fellows enough to keep their word turn to other forces.
In our time, the appeal is only to the threat of prosecution for perjury.
You can not trap a person for ordinary lies. But you can catch one once one
declares one is telling the truth. [If one believes in the power of the words,
the power of science’s non-magical words is not strong enough to dispel it].
Our priests of [“magical”] words are in advertising agencies. They use words
to persuade by emotion & misrepresentation. Legislators who enact loyalty
oaths do so when they claim oaths can secure the state against treason, or at
least to provide the machinery for punishing traitors. The state, the statesman,
the government officers, the manufacturers, all who use inconsistent means to
achieve stated ends, have confused words with events, & organize their lives
by magic & illusion.
In PA since 1952 every government employee had to swear or affirm
that they did not advocate the overthrow of the state or national government
or belong to an organization having such beliefs. If the Commonwealth of PA
had found some dangerous persons by its oath, the oath advocates would
have a case. Nobody has been discharged from his job for swearing falsely,
and nobody has been prosecuted for perjury.
THE FAILURE OF OATHS/THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES— Making men swear oaths doesn't reveal their love of truth or their fear of God.
It is a fact that in all the long record of loyalty-oath swearing, there is not a
single case of judicial conviction for swear. The God-fearing and law-abiding
have the habit of truth. The oath cannot reform the Godless and lawless.
The unintended Consequences are to: make men into liars; make men
believe in unreality and the illusion of security; corrupt the presumption of inno-
cence doctrine; make men timid; drive honest men from public service; esta-
blish patterns of conformity that encourage the totalitarian. William Penn said:
“If swearing came in by perfidiousness, distrust, dissimulation and falsehood,
it is most just that it ought to go out with them; … Honesty needs neither whip
nor spur; she is security for herself.”
Quakers wanted no double standard of truth, or to set a special time
for telling truth; every time was a time for truth. [Quakers sidestep swearing
by substituting “affirming.” To me, “affirming” is another name for the same
act. If one of the troubles with oath-taking is that it sets aside a special time
for truth-telling, then the words that make the occasion special aren't significant.
THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY—Anyone who says: “[a person] who
doesn’t want to take an oath must be disloyal,” [is coming from] a misunder-
standing of loyalty & why people take loyalty oaths. Loyalty is a matter of love.
Love is volunteered; it cannot be bidden. There was a Civil War widow & child.
The widow was told she would be fed as long as she swore every day she
was not & never had been loyal to the Confederacy. Will she starve her child?
People who are hungry or who want to keep their positions are vulnerable.
Janet Gray, 4 years old posed for a life class. Janet’s mother was told
that Janet would be paid, after a loyalty oath was taken. Janet couldn’t swear
as a minor; her mother couldn’t swear to what she didn't know, nor for behavior
of the last 5 years when Janet was only 4. It is hard to see how the state was
protected against foreign agents. Love doesn’t feed upon suspicion; it grows
on trust. Loyalty to country can be judged by deeds: words can never make
it so.
SILENCE IS GUILT/DRIVING OUT THE CONSCIENTIOUS—We
have always said: “Innocent until proven guilty.” But if any man refuses to take
an oath, it will be claimed that he must be guilty of what he refuses to swear.
When churches refused to make the affidavit of loyalty, it was argued that such
refusal “was a contention by them of a right to refrain & of a right to do the thing
which they refrain from disavowing.”
No good American ought to desire the overthrow of the government or the overthrow of presumption of innocence, either. It would always be easy to convict someone for every crime committed, if all the police had to do was find someone who would have trouble proving his innocence. The American system was designed to protect the citizen from governmental abuse and persecution. Loyalty oaths are chipping away at this keystone in the arch of justice.
Folks who have conscientious reasons for refusing to make the state-
ments required of them aren't the only ones caught by loyalty oaths. When the
Pechan Act became law in PA in 1952, 3 teachers, a social worker, 3 doctors,
and a nurse refused to make the declaration. They objected to: the timid con-
formity caused by it; the imposing of “totalitarian 100% Americanism”; an
atmosphere of mistrust; thought control methods; “compulsion to do a vain
thing”; giving up personal liberty; extorted loyalty oath, loss of liberty.
LESSONS IN TIMIDITY/PREPARATION FOR TOTALITARIANISM—
LESSONS IN TIMIDITY/PREPARATION FOR TOTALITARIANISM—
We can disregard those who refused the oath, and those who took the oath
under protest. Senator John H. Dent was such a man. He was not brave
enough to vote against the Bill, but he was brave enough to admit that he was
less than free. How many people in the Commonwealth have been encouraged
in the habit of timidity? A movie producer said: “I am sorrier for the rest of us
who are still in our jobs: we will be careful what we join; we will be suspicious
of our friends; we will watch our words. For every one fired, the blacklist has
made 99 others give up some of their liberty.”
There's no way to measure the cost to society of the practice of seeking
There's no way to measure the cost to society of the practice of seeking
loyalty by extortion. In a single decade we have lost the will to keep the State
in its place; we are no longer surprised to find powers in the hands of public
officials that would have caused a wild outcry only a generation ago. [From
1948-55], the city of Los Angeles protected itself [by a series of loyalty oaths
that covered a broader & broader group of people, from college faculty to all
State employees.
It labeled all employees as “civil defense workers” & making it an amendment to the constitution, to tax exempt agencies (e.g. churches, schools, social welfare agencies, & war veterans), to anyone using a public building, to elected or appointed officials, to candidates for office. Persons who spoke against the proposed amendment were characterized as suspicious or guilty of disloyalty.
Those who demanded loyalty oaths were not satisfied by the oaths
[& took other measures to ensure loyalty]. Suspicions & desires that lead
to adopting oaths cannot be assuaged easily. Illinois, New York & PA have
passed loyalty oaths & are exploring applying it to more & more people &
groups. Illinois requires oaths from residents in public housing projects, &
has 6 or 7 Quaker teachers who cannot be paid because they refused the
loyalty oath.
THE FINAL ARGUMENTS—Most people will not mind taking loyalty
THE FINAL ARGUMENTS—Most people will not mind taking loyalty
oaths. Their dignity isn't affronted because they have no principles that are vio-
lated by saying the words they have to say. [They are more alarmed by Russia than by any loss of freedom], say & do only what is popular, & don't associate
with radicals. If the 1st Amendment was taken away, it's likely that only a small
minority of Americans would notice. But our Republic with the Bill of Rights
promised a government that guarded against the tyranny of the majority.
The Republic thought the best way to prevent the government from
applying racks to the mind or body was to give every citizen the right to keep
still. Support of the Constitution does not demand of any citizen that he agree
with & advocate its current interpretation. [All the major reforms: abolition of
slavery, right to vote, due process of law took place because of advocacy of
minorities]. This is what the unverturesome majority would lose if it denied minorities the protection of the 1st and 5th Amendments.
That Quakers abhor violence is conceded by most non-Quaker. That they should with such convictions refuse to say so is incomprehensible to those who favor loyalty oaths. What we object to isn’t what is said, but the conditions under which we must say it. We oppose our government's force & violence, applied to the conscience of its citizens. The loyalty oath is magic. It depends for its power on fear. Those it entraps are possessed by fear. We can't encourage the love that makes us free by imposing the fear that makes us incapable of trust and love.
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95. Inner Liberty: the stubborn grit in the machine (by Peter Viereck; 1957)
[About the Author]—Peter R. E. Viereck (1916-2006), was an Ameri- can poet & political thinker, & professor of history at Mount Holyoke College for 5 decades. He was born in New York, He received his B.A. (1937), M.A. (1939) & Ph.D. (1942) from Harvard. Viereck was prolific in writing since 1938. He was a respected poet, who published many poetry collections. His poetry collection, Terror & Decorum, won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. This pamphlet deals with selfless sacrifice, holy pain, and the fight for the pri- vate life involved in the struggle for inner imagination against outer mechanization.
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95. Inner Liberty: the stubborn grit in the machine (by Peter Viereck; 1957)
[About the Author]—Peter R. E. Viereck (1916-2006), was an Ameri- can poet & political thinker, & professor of history at Mount Holyoke College for 5 decades. He was born in New York, He received his B.A. (1937), M.A. (1939) & Ph.D. (1942) from Harvard. Viereck was prolific in writing since 1938. He was a respected poet, who published many poetry collections. His poetry collection, Terror & Decorum, won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. This pamphlet deals with selfless sacrifice, holy pain, and the fight for the pri- vate life involved in the struggle for inner imagination against outer mechanization.
Between long intervals of dormancy, artists and writers suddenly buzz into the market place proclaiming: “Look, everyone; we’ve stopped being Irresponsibles!” Like every other citizen, the artist must be willing to “lay down his life for his country,” when freedom is at stake. But let him savagely re- fuse to lay down his dream life for his country. He can serve patriotism more permanently by deepening his insight and broadening his sensibility within his works of art. In the long run, whatever enriches your inner sensibility with the unguessed surprises of beauty and love, is a moral act and even a poli- tical act.
In every country much of the fight for free private life depends on the unadjusted imagination of its creative artists. The Over-adjusted Man knows only the public life. Religious, aesthetic, & intellectual creativity are what the individual does with his loneliness. The fight is to preserve anything playfully private [that does not smoothly fit into an efficiently, busily, useful society]. In certain moral crises the fight is not only for the private life but for the publicly embattled right to have a private life.
The 1st characteristic of the well-adjusted good-mixer, the kind of stu- dent who [objects to lonely walks] is the refusal to read books. Unadjusted Man is he who indulges in the vice of “over-reading.” Unless outer material power is assimilated to inner spiritual laws, all our efficient mechanization is merely paving our road to hell with good inventions. [This “good-mixer fetish” is even stressed on some college applications].
To remain individual in an overadjusted society, start out by being an amateur at everything, never a professional. This is true whether you are a poet, scholar, or political leader, whether you are an artist of life or of love or of billiards. An amateurish life is [harmonious and] finds time to cultivate the complete human. Ultimately freedom’s advantage over totalitarianism lies in the greater imaginative resourcefulness of the non-specializing free indivi- dual. In one sense, only by not knowing how to write or think “too well” can the imagination get the insights needed for the highest literary, philosophi- cal, or military achievements.
Without inner psychological liberty, outer civil liberties are not enough; it is a case of [both] “free from what” [and] “free for what.” My unstreamlined advice [to students is]: “Young lady, why not have the moral courage to be unadjusted, a bad mixer, and shockingly devoid of leadership qualities.” The depersonalization characterizing the present trend is the goal of adjustment as an end in itself. From being well-adjusted for its own sake, what a short step to becoming overadjusted, [publicly smiling, privately blank].
The humanist’s, the artist’s, the scholar’s new heroism, unriddling the inner universe, consists of being stubbornly unadjusted toward the mecha- nized, depersonalized bustle outside. They are heroes partly because with- out heroic pose. Their values are not determined by a democratic plebiscite. By revering the infinite preciousness of each individual soul, Christianity builds up a deep, soul-felt, inner shield against outer overadjustment.
The unadjusted should not be confused with the maladjusted, the psy- chiatric; nor with the never adjusted. The [truly] Unadjusted Man is more selective in not adjusting; they adjust to the ages, not to the age, [a choice] between lasting roots and ephemeral surfaces. The easy conformity baiting of adolescent radicalism refuses to adjust even to deep & valid norms. The dying words of Thomas More on the scaffold, [when modernized might be] “I die the state’s good servant.” “Good servant” distinguishes not only More unadjustedness from the radical’s nonconformity but from the rootlessness of bohemia’s loveless, facile “alienation.”
Western man, cannot misuse other worldly morality as a pretext for evading the moral choices involved in facing the material problems of this earth. During some ultimate hour of moral choice between principle & expe- dient survival, the non-materialist, the Christian, the man with inner liberty, walks to his scaffold smiling and unhesitant. What is new today is the more sophisticated ability of the Overadjusted Man to masquerade as an Unad- justed one.
So we must inspect closest the credential of those writers who pro- claim loudest their nonconformity. Genuine sensitivity, genuine humanity have nothing in common with the conveyor belt of culture robots who say “I am a real independent, nonconforming individualist, just like everybody else.” To manicure our sacred humanistic & religious values into [popular] fads may kill them more surely than any churches, invasion of open barba- rians, torch in hand, burning libraries, and universities.
Nothing can mechanically “produce” unadjustedness. The stress of many liberals on teaching ephemeral civic needs instead of permanent classics gave the anti-liberal demagogues their opening for trying to terrorize education into propagandizing for “Americanism.” These pressures of over- adjustment can be triumphantly resisted if the Unadjusted Man makes full use of the many available burrows of the creative imagination. Such sane asylums for individuality need never degenerate into the inhuman aloofness of the formalist so long as they continue to love the America they criticize.
The concept & currency of “nonconformity” has become so debased that [a phrase like] “a nonconformist in the Marlon Brando tradition,” is com- mon. [Writing styles when new can be] weapons of liberation because they give their public what it does not expect. The meaningful moral choice is between conforming to the ephemeral, stereotyped values of the moment & conforming to the ancient, lasting archetypal values shared by all creative cultures; archetypes [which] have grown out of the soil of history: slowly, painfully, organically. The sudden uprooting of archetypes was the most im- portant consequence of the worldwide industrial revolution.
Every over-adjusted society swallows up diversity and the creativity inherent in concrete personal loyalties and in loving attachment to unique local roots & their rich historical accretions. The creative imagination of the free artists requires private elbowroom, free from the pressure of centraliza- tion & the pressure of adjustment to a mass average. In the novel & in the poem, the most corrupting development of all is the substitution of technique for art.
Most modern readers aren't even bothered by the difference between an efficient but bloodless machine job & the living product of individual hearts’ anguish. What's the test for telling real inspiration from the just as-good? The test is pain. In a free democracy the only justified aristocracy is that of the lonely creative bitterness, the artistically creative scars of the fight for the inner imagination against outer mechanization: the fight for the private life.
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96. John Woolman and the 20th century (by Reginald Reynolds; 1958)
About the Author—Reginald Reynolds is an English Friend whose public life began in 1930. He was employed by Mahatma Gandhi as his emis- sary to the viceroy. Since then he has worked for colonial liberation and better race relations. In 1953 he made an overland “pilgrimage in search of hope” from Cairo to Cape Town.
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96. John Woolman and the 20th century (by Reginald Reynolds; 1958)
About the Author—Reginald Reynolds is an English Friend whose public life began in 1930. He was employed by Mahatma Gandhi as his emis- sary to the viceroy. Since then he has worked for colonial liberation and better race relations. In 1953 he made an overland “pilgrimage in search of hope” from Cairo to Cape Town.
FOREWORD—This pamphlet is from unscripted address at Mount Holly New Jersey, September 1956. I have tried to preserve the original form rather than [use] “literary” English. I hope there is a spontaneity here [unlike that] of a prepared script. I've tried to adhere to the word (not necessarily the precise words) given to me on that occasion. I stayed at the house devoted to the memory of John Woolman. Reading through a record of this talk, I am struck by the extent to which my experiences in America [American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)-sponsored work camps, seminar, institutes] pro- vide so many interpretations of the Woolman Way. Revolutionary change comes when you persuade people to examine their own beliefs with critical integrity.
John Woolman’s dangerous journey to meet Papunahung and tribe came to mind during the interracial seminar. [The swift change of the students could happen only where some catalyst is used to stimulate a searching heart. [I didn't add to the speech] because I don't want to repeat what I wrote in The Wisdom of John Woolman and because I place more emphasis on the “cata- lytic” function & less on the didactic, [in which prophets can be quoted with an absurd dulling of intelligence].
Quakerism began as a protest against a dead letter religion. Fox invites you to put aside all your second-hand knowledge and give the Holy Spirit a chance to speak. Even with a man like Woolman, care must be taken to not credit him with uniform verbal inspiration. [When the devil fails to destroy a great man’s virtue, he sends disciples as a last resort]. [Quotes are of no use unless the quoter has drunk from the same spring that was Woolman’s inspi- ration]. I would rather ask awkward questions than provide slick answers. “Blessed are the confused, for they may see the light. Beware of those with all the answers, for they are wrong.” I seek to use John Woolman here as an ef- fective catalyst.
[John Woolman’s Relevance]—[John Woolman used Habakkuk 3:17- 18, & I am quite certain that Romans 8: 38-39 spoke to John Woolman’s con- dition]. [It is] perhaps the greatest privilege I could hope for, being asked to this place at this time to talk of the man who means so much to me. I want to begin with a child's mind. [I had to ask 2 children that I loved more than the others to stay behind on a boat trip. When I told their mother “I gave them the privilege of not going,” she said, “You can only measure the privilege by the great desire that they had to go.” Those children had learned or were learning that the reward for goodness is not a material reward.
John Woolman said of children: “Natural affection needs a careful exa- mination. Operating upon us in a soft manner, it kindles desires of love & tenderness, & there is danger of taking it for something higher.” Natural affec- tion appears to be a branch of self-love, good in us with proper limitation, but otherwise is productive of evil, by exciting desires to promote some by means prejudicial to others.” [If we are] “contriving for the prosperity of our children, let us then lay the foundation deep, & by our constant uniform regard to an inward piety & virtue let them see that we really value it.”
In the Prodigal son story, the father trusted the elder brother would un- derstand his attitude to the younger, that his greatest trust & confidence in the elder was that his reward was to be unrewarded. In John Woolman’s case, an “ancient man of good esteem & owning slaves came to write his will. I asked him how he proposed to dispose of them. He told me & I said, ‘I cannot write thy will without breaking up my peace.”
John Woolman said of children: “Natural affection needs a careful exa- mination. Operating upon us in a soft manner, it kindles desires of love & tenderness, & there is danger of taking it for something higher.” Natural affec- tion appears to be a branch of self-love, good in us with proper limitation, but otherwise is productive of evil, by exciting desires to promote some by means prejudicial to others.” [If we are] “contriving for the prosperity of our children, let us then lay the foundation deep, & by our constant uniform regard to an inward piety & virtue let them see that we really value it.”
In the Prodigal son story, the father trusted the elder brother would un- derstand his attitude to the younger, that his greatest trust & confidence in the elder was that his reward was to be unrewarded. In John Woolman’s case, an “ancient man of good esteem & owning slaves came to write his will. I asked him how he proposed to dispose of them. He told me & I said, ‘I cannot write thy will without breaking up my peace.”
An all-white work camp had to decide whether to use segregated facilities; they decided not to. One girl said: “We had to decide what was the practical thing: to spend 4 days in comfort or to live at peace with ourselves afterwards. She had seen that it isn't “practical” to do a thing if it leaves behind an uneasy conscience. If we look into the “practical” question, it will resolve itself into the question: What can you do & still be at peace with yourself?
[John Woolman & Slavery]—John Woolman said: “Men taking on the government [& command] of others, may intend to govern reasonably and to make their subjects more happy than they would be otherwise … Where frail men assume such command, it tends to vitiate their minds and to make them unfit of government [of others].” [& he said]: “The love of ease & gain are the motives in general of keeping slaves; men are wont to take hold of weak arguments [from the Bible] to support a cause which is unreasonable.” [I think of both of these quotes] in relation to the problem of race & white domination in colonial imperialism. [I have noticed that] people, in spite of good intentions are corrupted by the very power which they exercise, & they use weak argu- ments to maintain an unreasonable cause.
I suggest you will find 4 stages which follow the original crude & quite irrational attitude to slavery: “the slave has a soul,” so we must teach the gos- pel to the slave; uneasiness about the slave trade—not slavery itself; “the in- stitution of slavery must end”; we owe something to these people beyond free- dom (i.e. rehabilitation). The Christian attitude to colonialism is, in my view, passing through 4 very similar processes: the heathen has a soul”; no new colonizing; colonialism's abolition; there is a little bit of rehabililitation going on.
Where do we as Quakers, fit into such programs? We should re- member the some very fine men were disowned by the Society of Friends before Woolman’s time for advocating slavery’s abolition too vigorously. With- in about 20 years of my life, the whole attitude of the Society of Friends in Eng- land change from a mixture of hostility & apathy with regard to India & Gandhi. The world did not accept all his teachings. The people learned to tolerate and respect and admire qualities which they find lacking in themselves. In our time we see that the pioneer is still able, by his devoted service, to bring attention to things and to change the minds of men & women, even though he may stand at times almost alone or apparently alone.
Horace Alexander said to me: “You read your Quaker history all wrong. The Society never was what you think it was. It was something from which very fine men & women sprang who did very fine work. But from John Wool- man to Elizabeth Fry and since, you will find nearly always that they had to proceed almost alone, with very little backing from Friends and sometimes none. It was only later that we accepted them and took credit for what they had done.” The dead weight of the Society lags behind the inspired individual, as all societies do. I have heard fundamental wisdom uttered in Meetings for Worship. If even 1/10 of that wisdom were applied in the lives of Friends not only the Society but the whole world might be very different today.
After a teenage institute, I was asked to sum up our Iowa experience. When I finished, instead of applauding, someone sang “Jacob’s Ladder,” which asked the question: If you love Him, why not serve Him? [I knew I was with a] fellowship of people, [black and white], who had learned that the love of God is inseparable from the service of God. There are always people who can tell us 12 reasons why we mustn't move too fast. The only patience I understand is [Paul’s patience] to “run with patience the race set before us, to run [a long distance], knowing that it's going to take time; but not lagging.
John Woolman had an imaginative capacity which most of us had yet to learn. He said: “If we bring this matter home & ‘put our soul in their souls’ stead; if we consider ourselves & our children as exposed to the hardships which these people lie under … had we none to plead our cause, nor any hope of relief from man, how would our cries ascend to the God of spirits who judges the world & in who is a refuge for the oppressed.”
[Besides apartheid in South Africa there is counter-apartheid,] blacks saying “If you don’t want us, we don’t want you.” A liberal white woman said: “Twice in my life I have known what it is to be on the wrong side of the color bar.” The division is horizontal not vertical; you are above that division or be- low it [i.e. the wrong side]. A woman missionary was overwhelmed by racial intolerance, with so much humiliation, so much degradation [throughout the culture]. The old missionary said: “You needn’t worry while it hurts, my dear. It is when it STOPS hurting that you can begin to worry.” I know that I only retain my sensitivity if I continued to exercise my imagination & to put my soul in their souls’ stead. In human relationships sensitivity is God’s essential gift.
[Spreading the Idea]—I have always described Woolman’s method as the personal approach to the social problem. We have almost lost touch with the primitive and essential method of spreading great ideas, namely to pass the idea along to the person is next in your life. The one essential thing about the spreading of ideas in the great historic tradition is that they spread by their own dynamic force, and they spread by geometric progression. Peo- ple who put out pamphlets haven’t begun to understand that all your litera- ture is secondary to what you are and what you do. It is only when you’ve got a person interested by other means that a pamphlet or peace movement can be made worthwhile. It was what John Woolman was that made people read his writings.
What Gandhi wrote & what he said could have been unimportant, but for what Gandhi was & what he did. The smallest spiritual unit is the human soul. It is as dynamic & explosive as the atom, & it can have chain reactions. The warlike Muslim Pathans of the Indian Northwest Frontier demonstrated in support of Gandhi & the Congress. The Government had 2 shocks, [be- cause Pathans were supposed to be violent & against all Hindus]. They received another shock when some of the Hindu troops they routinely used against Muslims refused to fire.
[In speaking of the Church], Christianity's apparent “success” under Constantine the Great was perhaps the most fatal thing that ever happened to the Church. Its apparent “failures,” from the cross onward, proved to be its strength. Only by seeking & following God’s guidance can we make right ethi- cal decisions, which will often seem foolish to many people.
[The incident with the Pathan demonstrators visited me again, in the person of the British officer who gave the order to fire & wrote me a letter 22 years after the fact about his conversion experience after his platoon’s refu- sal to fire]. A teenager spoke out of his own experience about the meaning of love. He said: “Love is not soft like water; it is hard like a rock, on which the waves of hatred beat in vain.”
[Conclusion]—John Woolman said: “Among the [drafting] officers are men of understanding, who when they have upright-hearted men to deal with, to put them to trouble on account of scruples of conscience is a painful task and likely to be avoided as much as may be easily. But where men profess to be meek and heavenly-minded and cannot join in wars, & yet, by their spirit and conduct in common life, manifest a contrary disposition, their difficulties are great at such a time.”
In our duty to our neighbor, how far does our Christianity stretch? [I met a missionary who told me frankly]: “I don’t want to be associated with them too closely myself.” [I later realized that I probably felt the same way about prejudiced white people who need Christ brought to them]. [A teenage girl wanted to dance with a Negro boy, but her father forbade her to do so; she worried about hurting the boy]. Her headmaster said: “Charlie is often hurt, [& will be] all through his life. Don’t hurt him any more than you can help. You have got to refuse in language that makes it quite clear you would have accep- ted it, but that your father won’t let you. So long as you feel the hurt with him, that is the thing that matters.”
Later, I came to see that the time was coming when it wasn't only Char- lie who was going to be hurt; Daddy was going to be hurt. This business of try- ing to feel with & for people when they hold ideas entirely repulsive to yours is something that Woolman understood. [An interracial group's director in the South reported to me]: “Those fiery crosses are a soul-searing experience. How does one get at the mind which makes this appalling distortion of the symbol of the cross?” I feel that only by seeking the same sources that Woolman sought can we hope to find the answer to it.
John Woolman said: “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ that liveth in me. And the life I now live in the flesh is by the faith in the Son of God, who loved & gave himself for me. Then the mystery was opened, and I perceived that there was joy in heaven over a sinner who had repented; and that that language John Woolman is dead, meant no more than the death of my own will.” http://www.pendlehill.org/product-category/pamphlets
97. Human Way Out (by Lewis Mumford; 1958)
[About Author & Pamphlet]—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) was an American historian, sociologist, technology-philosopher, & literary critic. He studied architecture, & had a writing career. Mumford made contributions to social philosophy, American literary & cultural history & technology's history. In Pentagon of Power, Mumford is stating implicitly, as others stated explicitly: contemporary human life's ecology is out of balance; its technical-ecology, (guns bombs, cars, drugs) is out of control, driven by forces peculiar to them & not governed by human needs. This pamphlet is from a speech at the Prayer & Conscience Vigil's closing in D.C. (1957).
[Introduction]—Our age has been characterized as the Nuclear Age or the Space Age, to celebrate [humankind's sudden command of time, space, and energy, in a fashion more absolute than one ever before dared to dream. The dark face [of this never-before-imagined control] is the age of mass, even absolute and universal, extermination and destruction. Instead of [going to] the moon, we must quickly find the human way out and reclaim this planet for humanity. Our national nuclear energy and weapons policy was conceived on false premises, and has been directed toward unsound, & ultimately inhuman and immoral objectives.
American national security has been built on a series of delusions. Our "pre-eminence" in scientific knowledge and technical skill reveals itself to be a childish vanity. Our rivals drew upon the same common reservoir of know- ledge, which offered many outlets it was not in our power to control. Boasting of massive powers of retaliation have only hastened the USSR's development of similar powers. The military measures we took have proved infinitely more dangerous than the dangers they sought to prevent. [The folly of] ending poli- tical conflicts by mass extermination [has been revealed]to all but the invinci- bly ignorant.
What should cause the deepest concern at this moment is really our moral backwardness. These 2 rival governments have at last collaborated in a suicide pact. Instead of schooling ourselves & all of humankind on the new personal responsibilities and the new collective disciplines that nuclear energy imposes, our leaders have shown no better grasp of the atomic age's problems than their Russian rivals.
Equal Blindness—The 1st step in overcoming Soviet Russia's ad- vantage is to withdraw from this competition. The American & Russian go- vernments have so far been equally lacking in morality. In their increasingly life & death struggle, each government has chosen the way of death: parity or superiority in the capacity for human extermination. Both governments are under the sway of stagnant ideas & obsolete behavior patterns, a stone age morality applied to an atomic civilization. Nuclear weapons make war's irrationality become total.
The American way is now as dead as the Russian way, unless we both admit that the human way of life is the only way that matters. Our conduct has departed from the human norm. We've no sense of horror, or guilt. We act as if nothing unusual has happened. The specialized minds who model their pat- terns of behavior most closely on the machine, have trained themselves to eli- minate the human factor from their thinking & conduct. These agents, thinking exclusively in terms of physical results, in utter disregard of the human ele- ments [risk extermination of humankind], & make the acceptance of their [self- destructive] dream the criterion of patriotism & sanity. .
To Be Human Is—If we were sufficiently human, we would have recoiled from our self-made nightmare. To be human is to admit that we are limited & fallible, frail in all our powers, & prone to perpetual self-deception, pride, corruption, error, and delusions of infallibility. Those who recognize their humanness know that they are weak even when they seem strong.
To remain human, we must look for the truth about ourselves in our enemies' taunts no less than the rebukes of our friends. Even their most limited decisions must be made in humility, always subject to the challenge of contrary opinion & the correction of facts & events, along with avoiding protective secrecy or censorship. Those who guard their humanness know that it is not for any single nation or human agent to make final decisions as to the use of the powers of life and death. The truly sane know that they are not sane enough to wield these powers except [under strict] guidance and restraint.
So deadened has our moral sense become, by immersion in exter- mination myths, paranoid dreams, moral disintegration, & criminal delinquen- cy, that the 1st stirrings out of this nightmare have been delayed. One can't be sure our countrymen are able to realize that our political & military pro- gram, based on "national interest," has become bankrupt. [The frantic fun- ding] of weapons research and scientific/technical education is an imitative flattery of the Russians.]
Perhaps we will carry this imitation into other parts of life, forfeiting the last vestiges of spiritual freedom & democratic control. "A man [/ nation] starts to like the thing he[/ it] hates." George William Russell. General Omar Brad- ley points out the futility of "devising arms ... both ultimate & disastrous," & goes on to say we must turn attention to saving mankind, if we are to have any prospect of saving ourselves.
No Scapegoats, No Saviors—Let us not seek either scapegoats or saviors. The guilt lies heavy on us all. America's errors have been made, by patriotic men earnestly serving their country, and hoping they also are serving freedom & democracy throughout the world. It has not yet been recognized that once nuclear weapons were invented, no nation was any longer at liberty to pursue its own exclusive goals. Even peaceful use of nuclear energy must take care not to upset the ecological balance and poison the planet.
Radioactive pollution now adds a far greater hazard than [even a century of] industrial pollution. In handling nuclear energy no one can afford to make guesses or miscalculations, for here, as nowhere else in life, error is irreversible & irretrievable for centuries. Our psychologically immature lea- ders, in their moral nihilism, have insulated themselves against the knowledge that would stop them from acting as they do. They pay lip service to the know- ledge, but don't allow it to be taken in, or themselves to be influenced by it.
How is the support of their policy as unanimous as media portrays it? [How is it as divided as we suspect it is]? Nobel Prize-winning scientists who take issue with the government have been denounced & besmirched falsely as special friends of Russia. Official censorship on political opinion also circumscribes circulation of vital scientific knowledge from those under security restrictions, & is another example [of Soviet style totalitarianism] that we imitate.
Compulsives and Submissives—Some Americans are alive to the disastrous nature of a genocidal atomic policy (called "massive retaliation" by John Foster Dulles) & our frozen-minded conduct of the cold war. The awakening people must face the stubborn resistance to reason put up by the dominant coalition of the Compulsives and Submissives. The Compulsive's fears, hatreds, suspicions, irrationalities, and morbid death-directed myths have been built into our normal institutional fabric. The conformity of the Sub- missives [with the Compulsives' policies] has been assured, through Madison Avenue, and Radio City, and through [the alluring distractions coming out of Detroit]. Then there is the young who are sometimes called the Silent Generation.
What is it that turns the young to imitate their elders, in acts of juvenile delinquency, acts no more senseless, no more horrible in their results, than adult acts we hypothetically call ABC warfare, that is Ato- mic, Biological, & Chemical extermination? The young's actions in gro- wing up quickly, or committing random acts of murder & hotrod suicide are the young's response to Big Bang, the final act of nuclear extermination by which humankind & all life will perish.
In the depths of their being, our children are more alive to reality; they are frustrated & silent, but they aren't fooled. A single, lone commander on one of the bases provocatively surrounding Communist nations, misreading the nature of an atomic accident or a series of lightning flashes & explosions, might trigger a full scale outbreak of nuclear genocide, based solely on his standing orders.
Pearl Harbor in Reverse—Hallucinations or misinterpretations of natural phenomena that produce UFOs can just as easily produce imaginary Russian planes, rockets, & nuclear explosions, under pressure of fear and suspicions; over-vigilance could produce a Pearl Harbor in reverse. The fate of the whole planet lies in the hands of any one of a few score weak, fallible people, vulnerable to illness, error, mental disorder, and the added burden of a tremendous responsibility. How far can human self-deception go in con- vincing themselves [that these centers of nuclear-war-waiting-to-hap- pen are] monuments of security? How is freedom & democracy safe- guarded by placing the power to make war in the hands of a few select military personnel?
Only those who had become too deeply involved in error to admit to themselves the inevitable consequences of what they are doing, would pre- tend that this unqualified gamble was in fact a prudent sort of life insurance. [To paraphrase Captain Ahab in Moby Dick]: "All [our] means are sane: [our] motives and objectives are mad." Freedom, democracy, security, health, wealth, the very capacity to become human would all vanish in the holocaust aimed at exterminating the enemy so that a remnant of our countrymen would temporarily survive. The vile gifts of radioactivity, which we would like to re- serve for our enemy, will surely come back to us, if ever we commit this final infamy. The fact that there are now 3 governments equally capable of utilizing these weapons of extermination, triples how mad and diabolical these plans are.
The Moral Bulwarks We Destroyed—In pursuing a one-sided policy, we failed to rebuild ancient moral bulwarks we ourselves ruthlessly helped de- stroy. We have neglected elementary safeguards against the damage one- sided nuclear war would do to the fabric of organic life. Who are we to cast [aspersions] on Communist government, their brutality & tyranny, while our own moral position remains exposed & vulnerable, shamelessly plain to all who care to see? Our chronic commitment to nuclear weapons, as a cheap manpower substitute, makes us unwilling to reduce armaments or pursue peace, except on our own inflexible terms.
As a 1st step back to sobriety and decency, let us acknowledge the menace under which humankind is now living wasn't Russia's invention. Our present danger springs from a fact that we have forcefully thrust from consci- ousness: the physical disintegration of the atom was accompanied by the modern human's moral disintegration (Italics from Summary Editor). Moral disintegration had nothing directly to do with atom bombs. In 1943, in order to minimize combat losses, & hasten the war's end, ["war"] authorities adop- ted the extermination bombing [of the general population] policy, once used only by fascists & Nazis, to terrorize them into early surrender.
Atrocious military conquerors of history never conceived of, & couldn't have done what was done [on both sides] in WW II. How many civi- lian deaths in WW II would have been done by hand before the execu- tioners sickened of their task? The farther away human victims are, the easier it is to see them as objects, targets, not people. Overnight, "total extermination" wiped out restrictions & limitations built up over centuries. De-thronement of morality, & human callousness have cost us dear. Random extermination put us in the same class as the criminal & psychotic Hitler. American fire bombs killed 180,000 in 1 night in Tokyo before Hiroshima.
The Path of Nihilism—It was our decision to use the method of exter- mination that led to our one-sided, obsessive preoccupation with nuclear weapons. This moral disintegration vastly augmented dangers of atomic power. If we have removed our inhibitions against mass extermination, we have also increased our fears that we as a nation are open to complete extermination. The silence and apathy of the majority condones this collec- tive in.
Religious and moral leaders have shrunk from this subject, or even given their blessing to it. The highly respected Secretary Henry L. Stimson's stand on nuclear policy made it easier for other presumably virtuous peo- ple to close their minds to our moral collapse. How can we open our eyes wide enough to realize where we are and where we are going? How can we find enough human-heartedness to repent of our conduct in the past [and change course]? Our leaders are now so deeply sunk in the groove of pre-atomic politics, that they can imagine no alternatives. [In nuclear policy], our leaders' concerns must expand beyond protecting our nation and countrymen to protecting the planet and human race.
The truths about radioactive contamination are grave enough to call for slowing down our headlong program for exploiting these powers. The Atomic Energy Commission sanctioned continued nuclear testing, saying these tests, "only" shortened life by a few days, & would cause "only" 2,000 or less chil- dren/year to die from leukemia & cancer. Americans of sober judgement would ask: Who are these self-appointed judges, sitting in judgment on their own decisions, who sanction the robbery of life, [& decide "acceptable" numbers of days life is shortened, & "acceptable" numbers of children dying from radiation-related illnesses]? This "tolerable risk" is in fact a lethal and intolerable certainty.
End of the Secrecy—Humankind's salvation lies in breaking through the formidable wall of secrecy and suppression, half-truths & outright prevari- cations erected by our government agencies. Our government has resorted to soothing reassurances based on scientific quackery attached to eminent scientists. Genetic effects and inheritable injuries from radioactivity won't be visible for 2 generations, so no scientific evidence yet exists as to long-term effects of radiation. These baseless reassurances are addled science and tainted politics.
If even peacetime use of nuclear energy is fraught with difficulties & dangers, then the concentration used in wartime would be genocidal assaults upon all life. Our security lies not in weapons, but in all having an equal stake in keeping alive & healthy. We need wisdom, self-restraint, & human sympa- thy on a global scale to safeguard the human race; no single nation or order of men, can claim capacity to act alone in these matters.
If even peacetime use of nuclear energy is fraught with difficulties & dangers, then the concentration used in wartime would be genocidal assaults upon all life. Our security lies not in weapons, but in all having an equal stake in keeping alive & healthy. We need wisdom, self-restraint, & human sympa- thy on a global scale to safeguard the human race; no single nation or order of men, can claim capacity to act alone in these matters.
No Half-Measures—We shall not demolish atomic armament we have built by removing a few stones, or abandoning a few minor, exposed positions. No piecemeal bargaining, producing a few unwilling moves will bring sal- vation. The only way to escape our present death trap is to abandon it forth- rightly & unconditionally, as an affront to humanity. To assume we can't turn back, is to accept a narrowing field of vision, a deadening of human sensibili- ties, substitution of a single senseless act for the varied responses of a living organism.
We took the wrong turn because the right road was still only a faint track, the rude outline of a broad highway that could not be used until our neighbors were brought together to help build it. [We must share the doing of those] things we have insisted on doing single-handedly, and often high- handedly, in futile conflict with Soviet Russia. Nothing [like nuclear radiation] can be assumed to be an exclusively national problem. Once supple and vigilant minds like Niels Bohr, Erich Fromm, Betrand Russel, Radhakrish- man, Boyd Orr, & Albert Schweitzer are called into action, there will be no lack of visible alternatives to the power elite's policies.
About Face! Forward March!—Military & scientific specialists are incompetent to deal with problems on a human level, & so are the last people whose advice we can take. Before the vigilant men we mentioned earlier can help us, we must admit that the security we relied on never existed. Large-scale nuclear war threatens victor & victim. We must retrace & take our steps without making them conditional on what other nations will or won't willingly do.
What we haven't been able to do by threats & compulsions, we may yet be able to do by fully manifesting our humanity. Before that, we shall have to win over our most formidable enemy: ourselves. We must limit & slow down exploitation of nuclear energies in every form, until adequate physical & moral safeguards are in place, including those against pollution & premature medical and industrial applications.
We must abandon the cold war, seek, & find goals & purposes we can share with the Communist-led peoples. We must recognize the same suspi- cion, arrogance, & indifference to moral principle in ourselves that we find in Soviet Russia. Our national duty at this moment is to make plans based on the realities of nuclear power, & addressed to the protection in & salvation of humankind. We must take this road, even if at first we have to take it alone. No risk we will face is half as formidable as the hazards we live under every day while we postpone this duty. What spiritual influence will produce in the majority a dismissal of delusions of absolute power & seek a fresh start? What will overcome our leaders' [& our oppositions'] rigidity, suspicions & hatreds?
Divine Grace and Human Duty—The situation calls for a great col- lective illumination, made operative by a providential act of grace, an "on-the- road-to-Damascus" transformation. Neither earnest propaganda, nor prayer- ful beseechment, nor rational demonstration will of themselves produce the needed result. [Those who think a reversal of course by this nation's majority is impossible] presume to know in advance the limits of human potentiality. Though I am not a churchgoing man, life itself has taught me the meaning of God's grace. What capacities will humankind summon forth to cope with illimitable powers and dangers?
[Pamphlet author cites example of the reversal of the net birth rate's downward trend in the 20th century's 1st half as an example of an unlikely, instinctive & spontaneous change in a seemingly unchangeable trend].
Who [dares] to fix in advance the limits of human imagination, invention, intelligence and sympathy in confronting the present threat to humankind? Who [dares] predict what is or is not possible under cir- cumstances that humankind has not faced before? Our business isn't to [limit] what is possible. Ours is the humbler task recognizing what is neces- sary, and acting with all our power so as to bring it about, leaving the issue itself to God. The one thing necessary today is save the human race from the possibility of wanton extermination and biological degradation.
Who [dares] to fix in advance the limits of human imagination, invention, intelligence and sympathy in confronting the present threat to humankind? Who [dares] predict what is or is not possible under cir- cumstances that humankind has not faced before? Our business isn't to [limit] what is possible. Ours is the humbler task recognizing what is neces- sary, and acting with all our power so as to bring it about, leaving the issue itself to God. The one thing necessary today is save the human race from the possibility of wanton extermination and biological degradation.
If we dare to speak and act on behalf of the human race, as bro- thers helping brothers, who will oppose us? The hour is late for finding the human way out [of wanton extermination and biological degradation]. It will not be easy to replace our selfish plans, limited purposes, diabolical instruments, with plans having truly human purpose ... and divine inspiration ... The mistakes we have made cannot be undone in a day, nor yet in a decade, even with a general awakening & transformation of purpose ... Let us seek "not our own profit but the profit of many, that they may be saved."
(by Gerhard Friedrich; 1958)
About the Author/ About Herman Melville—Gerhard Friedrich tea- ches American literature at Haverford College; he was born in Germany & joined the Society of Friends there. He refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Hitler government. He studied in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New York, & Minnesota. A recently published book of his poems is entitled The Map Within the Mind.
Herman Melville was born in NYC in 1819 and died there in 1891. His 4-year voyage into the Pacific (1841-44) inspired 5 striking, searching novels: Typee: a Peep at Polynesian Life (1846); Omoo: A Narrative of Adventure in the South Seas (1847); Mardi: A voyage Thither (1849); White-Jacket (The World in a Man-of-War) (1850); and Moby-Dick (The Whale) (1851)
POSTSCRIPT TO MOBY DICK—The great albino whale is on the loose,/ As when the Pequod chased him round the world ... We have our Ahabs and Fedallahs [stowaway and herald of descending evil] yet/ Who search the 7 seas for Moby Dick. / But what they would destroy, that they beget,/ Defeated by their own disastrous trick./ And Starbuck only, in the dead of night, Sees far beyond the doom Nantucket Light.
POSTSCRIPT TO MOBY DICK—The great albino whale is on the loose,/ As when the Pequod chased him round the world ... We have our Ahabs and Fedallahs [stowaway and herald of descending evil] yet/ Who search the 7 seas for Moby Dick. / But what they would destroy, that they beget,/ Defeated by their own disastrous trick./ And Starbuck only, in the dead of night, Sees far beyond the doom Nantucket Light.
"I see a Whale in the South-sea, drinking my soul away. William Blake (1793)
[Introduction]—This was Blake's startling observation and succinct summary of Moby Dick; Melville failed to include this quote in the "Extracts" portion of his prelude. Melville writes: "as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, encompassed by the all the horrors of the ½-known life. [Stay in Tahiti]." Melville knew the stark reality of a whaling life by personal experi- ence, and so he couldn't [have romanticized] that life. Anyone reading Moby Dick in the context of the mid-20th century, should have an immensely disturbing experience.
This book projects an injured man's symbolic story; his determination to avenge his [lost leg] leads him & a cosmopolitan crew halfway around the world to apocalyptic disaster. His not-so-fictional fiction of an international & multi-racial assortment of men in pursuit of their Whale makes a "Whale Gospel." Nantucket Quakers were a key part of Moby Dick; they were promi- nent in the whaling industry of the early & middle 1800's.
Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur wrote of Nantucket Quaker- dom & whaling in Letters from an American Farmer (1782). The following is quoted from Letters V and VI: "Friends' various opinions and prejudices are well-known: obedience to ["God's Laws], even to non-resistance, justice, goodwill to all, benevolence at home, sobriety, meekness, neatness, love of order, fondness and appetite for commerce.
[In whaling boats], they row in profound silence, leaving the whole conduct of the enterprise to the harpooner and to the steersman ... When the harpooner judges himself to be ... at the distance of about 15 feet, he bids them stop ... He balances high the harpoon, trying in this important moment to collect all the energy of which he is capable. He launches it forth—she is struck. Sometimes in ... rage, she will attack the boat & demolish it with one stroke of her tail ... the fragile vehicle disappears and the assailants are im- mersed in the dreadful element ... At other times she will dive & disappears from human sight; everything must give way to her velocity ... Her [sudden] swiftness in drawing tight the cord may set the edge of the boat on fire by the friction ...
The blood she has lost in flight, weakens her so much, that if she sinks again, it is for a short time ... She soon reappears; tired at last with convulsing the elements, which she tinges with her blood; sometimes she dies [at this point] & floats. Other times it may happen that she isn't danger- ously wounded ... then she will alternately dive & rise, & swim with unaba- ted vigor ... & carry the boat along with amazing velocity; this sudden impedi- ment will either retard her speed or only rouse her anger. When the boat's bows are greatly pulled down, & it begins ... to take much water, the harpoo- ner brings the axe almost in contact with the cord ... [but waits in the hope] she will relax ... It is wonderful how far these people have carried their daring courage at this awful moment. When she is caught & finally dies, she is towed alongside of their vessel, where she is fastened.
Melville probes not only the nature and existence of whales & whale- hunting; he also unsparingly probes the [whaling] Quaker's conduct. His cap- tain-hero says of the Quaker 1st mate: "Starbuck is Stubb reversed & Stubb is Starbuck, ye 2 are all humankind." The inquiry is into the created world & what constitutes appropriate human behavior amidst the lands & oceans of reality. [The book asserts that]: "Unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth."
The REALM of the NATURAL WORLD—Consider once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea.
Melville's Moby Dick takes note of mankind's ingenuity & exploitation of the world's material resources, including the worth of particular products [gleaned] from whale hunts. In the many chapters devoted to animal- life studies, descriptions [go back & forth] from lyric awe to troubled doubt & [uncertain presentation of] enigma. Resolving apparent contradictions, & comprehending a purpose becomes an acute human need. Melville noted juxtaposition of "Tiger" & "Lamb," [savagery & gentle beauty in the ocean]. He notes that the seas won't be converted into civil moderation by Christian preaching & damning. Might seems often right, being built into the natural world as at present constituted; there are monstrous miracles & miraculous monsters. Out of a strong need to understand the natural world, Melville has chosen the Leviathan as his text for fullest possible exegesis.
The INSCRUTABLE CENTER/ CAPTAINS PELEG & BILDAD: CO- OWNERS; LICENSED PILOTS; QUAKERS—"The mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable."
Man may, with Job-like patience and humility, trust in the wisdom of the total, [natural] scheme yet to be discovered, or he may react against his trials & tribulations by an assertion of his powers, shaping the course of events in his own favor, [which could in turn be interpreted] as an intended evolutionary response, in which man is elevated to the position of a good steward or co-partner with the universe. The fierce, extinguishing blows a [zealous], holier-than-thou reformer, or [an equally zealous] rebel-at-heart would strike betray a common conceit. [Both extremes] are combined in Captain Ahab, who manages both their faces with the same effect.
[We want to confront the maker of things directly]. We cannot, and yet his mysterious identity intrigues us so that we would assault & conquer it. We can't hunt down, harpoon, or slay the meaning of life, which swims on, [granting us only glimpses], but otherwise remaining beyond our reach, inscrutable. [What we can see & know leaves us with] a series of instructive paradoxes.
There is the paradox of Captains Peleg and Bildad, more Quakerish than Quaker, owners of the Pequod or Destroyer. Both, being old whalesmen themselves, are aware of the cruel means to be employed, & the nightmarish ends to be pursued. Were they altruistic in providing a form of illumina- tion & building materials to humankind, or were they lured by the great fortunes to be made in waging unprovoked, brutal war upon [Levia- thans of the deep? Peleg, Bildad, and Starbuck calculated a path to profit , "harpooned & dragged up from the sea." Every whale hunt is an irreligious pursuit and argues an obtuse, hollow, and savage belief.
Bildad's biblical namesake was one of Job's false comforters. For him, profit comes before piety. Even Bildad's sister, with a concern for tempe- rance, has profited from whaling, [& embraces ladle & the lance, as whaling symbols, & the sources of her income]. Quaker peculiarities are "variously & anomalously modified by things that are alien to them... They are fighting Quakers, & Quakers with a vengeance." How does Bildad reconcile con- scientious objection to military service with a [violent, bloody] invasion of the ocean? [One suspects] that religiosity & hard-hearted dividend- prac- ticalness [resided in him] as only the most nominal of neighbors, avoiding ever [taking a good look at each other]. Melville exaggerates Quaker hard- ness, shrewdness, parsimony, & double-dealing; that concession still leaves cause for moral & religious uneasiness in modern Quakers.
AHAB: the PEQUOD'S CAPTAIN and MONOMANIAC—There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. Peleg's and Bildad's contradictory Quakerism set the stage for Pequod's fateful, paradoxical captain. His biblical namesake was Israel's king, who abandoned Jehovah for the false worship of Baal. Captain Ahab imagined himself "a great lord of Leviathans." For 40 years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for 40 years to make war on the horrors of the deep." Bildad describes him as a "grand, ungodly, god-like man." Ahab saw the other 2 captains as "miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience." Ahab launches himself and countless unsuspecting victims along an inglorious path to uncharted death.
This sea-borne tyrant's sheer dominance is a frightening phenomenon. His view of his crew is: "Ye aren't other men, but my arms & legs; and so obey." In the course of the voyage his craze becomes suffused & nearly gene- ralized among the crew as a mass hysteria that has convincing examples in recent history. Ahab's hold over others lies in the fierce single-mindedness of his arrogant mission. The judgment soon overtaking him is to an extent his own making. A man may, physically & mentally, be overwhelmed by the violence which he uses to extinguish the demon phantom of an arch enemy. He has been transformed into a thought-tormented outcast.
This sea-borne tyrant's sheer dominance is a frightening phenomenon. His view of his crew is: "Ye aren't other men, but my arms & legs; and so obey." In the course of the voyage his craze becomes suffused & nearly gene- ralized among the crew as a mass hysteria that has convincing examples in recent history. Ahab's hold over others lies in the fierce single-mindedness of his arrogant mission. The judgment soon overtaking him is to an extent his own making. A man may, physically & mentally, be overwhelmed by the violence which he uses to extinguish the demon phantom of an arch enemy. He has been transformed into a thought-tormented outcast.
Ahab stands for all those who, by a [complicated web] of factors, have been maimed, not merely in body [and mind], but more in spirit, and in whom the pain [in all facets of the self] has been hardened into a fanatical antago- nism. He seems to resent the more fortunate lot of others so intensely, if deviously, that he must drag them down with him to a common doom. He pur- sues the hated whale in his troubled sleep as in his brooding wakefulness. It remains for modern psychology to puzzle over a cure.
What is behind our fascination with the sensational and the terri- ble? What is behind the lure of distant sea adventures? Perhaps Ahab symbolizes the general undercurrent of man's destructive drive. Hawthorne writes: "In the depths of every heart there is a tomb & a dungeon. The lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide."
There appear to be Ahab elements in the systems of normal beings which tend by ill-favored vicissitudes to make floating islands of us, in the unknown's currents. Ahab is emphatically not a devout shipmaster; the "unsurrenderable willfulness" of his dark and proud faith remains subject to quite opposite yearnings. When he turns, briefly, confidingly to his chief mate, it is as to his other, defeated & forsaken self, to his opposite pole, and the tangled relations between the 2 men accentuate their tragic failures.
STARBUCK: PEQUOD'S CHIEF MATE & QUAKER CONSCIENCE —But Starbuck looked away.
Starbuck is a Quaker with a conscience, caught up in the whaling-mad dictatorship of the Pequod's captain. [He does not take] his Quakerism for granted as a birthright Quaker; he has a deep natural reverence, conscience, and dedication, but he can't out talk and out face his mutilated and mightily enraged superior. At best he is a principled dissenter, at worst a mere would- do, [wanna-be].
Starbuck is a Quaker with a conscience, caught up in the whaling-mad dictatorship of the Pequod's captain. [He does not take] his Quakerism for granted as a birthright Quaker; he has a deep natural reverence, conscience, and dedication, but he can't out talk and out face his mutilated and mightily enraged superior. At best he is a principled dissenter, at worst a mere would- do, [wanna-be].
Starbuck sees the end-product of Ahab's voyage, but he does not manage to dissociate himself decisively from the feverish futility; all his tenta- tive protests come to nothing. He looks down deep and does believe, yet his faith is not dynamic enough to oust the facts at hand. Starbuck is, in general, insensitive to the bloody ungodliness of whale hunts in general. Now he is involved in a singularly unreasonable, monstrous whaling expedition that he is not allowed to survive. His lone opposition is of enormous importance. He asks at the end: [How] is this the end of all my bursting prayers and my lifelong fidelities?
He reacts courageously to Ahab's stated mission: "I came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance." He hopes that time & tide may prevent his mad overlord from the proclaimed purpose, & that his own humanity may outfight the horrid old man, whom he pities. Ahab is aware that he must guard against defection & opposition. There is confrontation, with bullying, & patient reasoning, leveled musket & near blasphemous assertions: "There is one God as Lord over the Earth, and one Captain as lord over the Pequod. There is warning: "God is against thee, old man, forbear! 'Tis an ill voyage, ill begun, ill continued. Let me square the yards, while we may, old man, & make a fair wind of it homewards, to go on a better voyage than this."
Outraged, exasperated, and desperate, he levels a musket at the sleeping captain. As Quaker, he must think, consider, query, be principled. He decides, for good or ill, against the "death-tube" as an instrument in human relations. Against the charge of irresolution, Melville states: "Starbuck was an honest, upright man." Starbuck becomes Ahab's brother-confessor, as Ahab seeks to "look into a human eye," & Starbuck addresses his captain as a "noble soul, grand old heart, after all." The tragedy of Starbuck's "mild- blue" Quakerism is now so clear to him that he is "blanched to a corpse's hue with despair." Reduced to impotence, Starbuck turns to Divine interces- sion.
Starbuck says, "I misdoubt [suspect] I disobey God in obeying him"; "It's a brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then"; & "Stir thyself Starbuck ... speak aloud ... Oh, Ahab, not too late is it, even now, the 3rd day, to desist ... Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou that madly seekest him." Mellville tells Hawthorne: "I have written a wicked book, & feel spotless as the lamb. [Moby Dick has been compared to the New Tes- tament, with the Pequod finally a Golgotha symbol.
Starbuck's failure [to effectively assert opposition to Ahab's madness] leaves the modern reader with several important queries: How can good assert itself in a human world gone astray? How is good crucified —in massive atrocities—by its own limitations? How does Melville's phrase, "the choice, hidden handful of the Divine Inert" apply to each of us? How are we making it our business to speak and act effectu ally to the conditions of [those in our time] roaming [metaphorical] seas with dubious & dangerous purposes? [The price of failure to act is exemplified by] the impotence of the Quaker objector who, against his better judgment, proceeds to aid & abet the hell-bent captain to the point of securing him in his final look-out with rope. Ahab says, "Take the rope, sir— I give it into thy hands Starbuck."
ISHMAEL: a SIMPLE SAILOR and COMMENTATOR—Technically, Ishmael is Melville's authentic spokesman to relate the wrecked Pequod's case, "the melancholy ship's tragedy." More than Starbuck or anyone else aboard, he has managed to resist Ahab's hypnotic spell, being a shrewd observer of, rather than a participant in, the insanely destructive activity. He was forewarned [& taught] by Father Mapple's sermon about Jonah & his wilful impiety & repentance. [Ishmael simplifies his faith from the] "infalli- ble Presbyterian Church" down to the Golden Rule—"that is God's will."
ISHMAEL: a SIMPLE SAILOR and COMMENTATOR—Technically, Ishmael is Melville's authentic spokesman to relate the wrecked Pequod's case, "the melancholy ship's tragedy." More than Starbuck or anyone else aboard, he has managed to resist Ahab's hypnotic spell, being a shrewd observer of, rather than a participant in, the insanely destructive activity. He was forewarned [& taught] by Father Mapple's sermon about Jonah & his wilful impiety & repentance. [Ishmael simplifies his faith from the] "infalli- ble Presbyterian Church" down to the Golden Rule—"that is God's will."
One can only speculate whether Melville intended Ishmael as some- thing of a Quaker better than Starbuck. He has rare virtues of strong vitality, thick walls, & interior spaciousness; he uses the phrase "live in this world without being of it." Ishmael realizes that "another's mistakes or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster & death." Melville uses Ishmael to say, "That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man can't be true—not true or undeveloped. With books the same."
The small [story-] arcs of Peleg, Bildad, Ahab, Starbuck, & Ishmael make a broken chain. Each of these fragments provides us with lessons that jolt. The Rachel's captain who rescued Ishmael, the Pequod's lone survivor, was the same captain who in vain asked Ahab to have the Pe- quod to join in the search for his 12 year-old son. That captain invoked the Golden Rule with Ahab, to no avail. The book's last sentence obliquely infers that it behooves the loser and the lost to be to each other as brother's keepers. Moby Dick is a demand, not for any posture of belief, but for daring acts of confirmation; not for this or that ingenious theory about the ideal, but for [active] proofs of a sturdy and converting love.
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99. A Deeper Faith: The Thought of Paul Tillich (by Carol R. Murphy; 1958)
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99. A Deeper Faith: The Thought of Paul Tillich (by Carol R. Murphy; 1958)
About the Author—Carol Murphy is a writer on religious philosophy & pastoral psychology. She studied political science at Swarthmore College & was a student in religious philosophy while at Pendle Hill. She studied pasto- ral counseling at: Garrett Biblical Institute, MA Gen. Hospital, & Worcester State Hospital. She is the author of 4 previous Pendle Hill pamphlets: The Faith of an Ex-Agnostic, The Ministry of Counseling, Religion & Mental Ill- ness, and The Examined Life.
[Introduction/ Opposites of Great Truths]—Wilbur D. Steele writes in "The Man Who Saw through Heaven" of Rev. Hubert Diana, who [had his universes expanded] by an astronomer, who said the reverend's opal ring may be a universe, & our universe may be an opal ring on a cosmic Finger. The experience was catastrophic. He vanished into darkest Africa, leaving a trail of crude clay images of the cosmic ring-bearer. The final figure was a man, head bent over a ring in an "attitude of intense & static, breathless & eternal interest focused on the ring," [somehow observing in the ring's atoms & electrons a hill & a 2-legged mite there about to die].
Paul Tillich was enough of a courageous and deep thinker to stand in thought at the boundary between philosophy and theology, human and God, and receive the shock of his encounter. Tillich writes: The result of tension [between religion and classical humanism for me] was a split-conscious- ness which drove one to attempt to overcome the conflict constructively." He finds the element of truth of 2 opposing viewpoints, & lets them wrestle with each other in his mind until they bless each other.
Niels Bohr said: [In] trivial truths & great truths, the opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false; the opposite of a great truth is also true. Tillich would say to Rev. Diana: "You are moving from naive certainty, through doubt, to the faith that includes & overcomes doubt." Culturally, there is a parting from the original tribal or family consciousness to the awareness that I am I, standing alone, wondering how I can know other things or love other men.
"In a universe of relationships it is necessary for its constituent beings to be apart and relatively self-ruling as well as participants in the whole. In the Christian view, separation from God is as necessary to the divine love as the divine reunion with him; God must be the Thou whom we encounter. Why can we not find our way back from a loss of faith easily? Why is humankind prey to fear and ignorance? Why do we hate our finitude? Why does God sometimes seem to be an Enemy rather than a Father? Why do we become enemies to ourselves? This human sepa- ration from God Tillich calls estrangement. In Tillich's mind, freedom & des- tiny are polar to each other. Human freedom shapes human destiny, & human destiny shapes human freedom.
[Imperfect, Mechanistic Theology & Estrangement]—The theolo- gian is like Mr. Diana, a finite man in the dark, seeking for God with the rest of us, speaking of revelation not as its giver, but as its imperfect receiver. [His life should reveal having been answered by God]. Some 18th century thinkers have an optimistic, mechanistic belief that nature reveals its Maker the way the mechanism of a watch implied a watchmaker. At the other end are some Calvinists—old and new—to whom nature appears bereft of divinity & God, who is forever hidden from human reason. Tillich can agree with neither; but he can accept the spark of truth in each.
[Mr. Diana grew up in a restrictive, absolute, externally imposed theo- logy and morality, with very narrow blinkers on. In the first flush of emancipa- tion from his tradition, when he paraded naked before scandalized shipmates], he was testing a repudiation of external claims. His [bearded Jehovah] had been too small—and it had burst at the seams, leaving him (apparently) with nothing. There is conflict between external authority & self-rule. Thomas Kelly writes: "Just when the humanist is playing the part of Jehovah ... he is pretty sure to find that humanity has, in its depths, experiences which lead out ...into a divine MORE ... Religious thought oscillates between transcendent separa- tion and immanent divinity."
The history of the Society of Friends has shown that the resolution of elderism vs. Ranterism, consistency vs. compromise, revivalism vs. rationa- lism comes only through the Inward Light. What is the ground of: our own & all being; the ground of causality; essential being; goodness? If [the Creator] seems to recede behind the gulf fixed between created and Creator, he/she is also closer to us than breathing, for that is our ground, and holiness can grasp us through any finite symbol.
Tillich believes that the infinite can be present in the finite, that nature is the finite expression of the ground of all things. The infinite could thus grasp Mr. Diana and shake his foundations & turn him into an atheist. Truth-seeking atheism's history has been one of overcoming the blasphemy of making a dubi- ous and finite thing of God. The knowledge Mr. Diana needed was an insight into the mind of God in its bearing on his destiny.
In his state of ultimate concern, he encountered the Holy, which fulfilled a need no other encounter can fill. The experience is real & immediate. A faith built on its reality is founded on a rock. Our understanding of it and thinking about it is always inadequate and subject to critical doubt & deep anxiety. Like Diana's clay figures, humanity's road is strewn with discarded symbols & sys- tems intended to portray the meaning of holiness. Beliefs perish while faith remains.
[Tillich and symbols]—Tillich's genuine symbol bears with it some of the power of being. To Mr. Diana, the immensity of space powerfully symbolized God's greatness. To everyone great spaces brings awe, even when we know better than to worship mere bigness. Symbols do not live for- ever, but while they live they are powerful over the spirit of man. The symbol itself is finite, while it points to the infinite and unconditioned.
Hence it is always in danger of becoming an idol when men fail to look beyond it. [Native Americans may go no further than finding] "God in clouds or hear him in the wind." But equally pitiable are those in a religious void for whom no natural thing is freighted with divinity: "It moves us not—Great God! I'd rather be/ A Pagan suckled in a creed out worn ..." We must bring to every symbol the double attitude: This is not Thou, even this is Thou.
When minds are entangled in estrangement, symbol usurps ultimate's place, to point to itself; God becomes an idol. Men too, made in God's image, reject their finitude; their creative power becomes demonic. Jesus saw that it was Pharisees, not "sinners" who manifested estrangement's results. In Communism, political survival becomes the goal rather than the working classes' good. The church tends to speak as God rather than for God, to work for the hierarchy's success rather than the Kingdom's coming. [When the Church seeks] tyranny over man's mind, [it's small wonder] that free man prefers democratic pluralism, moral autonomy & skeptical secularism.
[Courage, Anxiety & Despair]—Mr. Diana's early courage & faith was found within human culture, & was authoritarian, over-literal, & Phari- saic. This courage he lost, to be replaced by primal anxiety of one threa- tened by the void. He regained courage when he found new faith in reunion with an accepting God. Tillich believes religion is culture's task & substance; culture is religion's form. [Anxiety took different forms in the past]. It was fear of fate & death for pagans; guilt & moral condemnation in the Middle Ages, with fear of Hell & the insufficiency of penance towards its end. Fear of death & condemnation is still a factor in Western civilization. We are awaiting a key symbol's birth; it will speak to our time's condition. We need assurance of where we are & why.
In courage and despair glimpses can be seen of the wholeness [& uni- tedness] which could have been ours. For Tillich, theonomy is an attitude of reliance on the uncreated, divine inner light in the human soul, reason united with its own depth. Theonomy is divine law. It shone in Mr. Diana face when he had completed his final image and came forth with a new freedom and a new commitment to kneel down in prayer and die.
[Revelation, Salvation, & Reunion]—In feeling ultimate concern, man transcends limitations, to touch the ultimate [in a revelation-moment]. Mr. Diana's revelation wasn't new; it was a coming home to him of Christ's revela- tion in Jesus. Humankind is caught in a struggle between holiness & the idols' inadequacy. Diana's idols had the power to pull the soul together into whole- ness at first, but when god becomes demon, the soul is shattered & estranged.
Humankind has been prepared by "the invisible process which secretly moves through history." This universal principle has concrete expression in Jesus received as the Christ. Imagine a Mr. Diana of ancient times, an earnest Jew whose faith was shaken by Greek metaphysical speculation, who had [forsaken the Law, & who then sought in fear & trembling to know how God to know how God could be mindful of one.
How could new teachings of someone from Galilee, teachings which weren't Pharasaic, be revelatory? How did the "historical Jesus" —the man from Nazareth & his teachings, doctrines about him—have saving power? Not everyone who saw the physical Jesus saw him as Christ. Tillich reminds us; we have an interpretive portrait, not Jesus' photo. Whoever saves must be more than Jesus, or a new moral standard, or a new demand doctrine, or religion. Jesus isn't creator of a new religion, but a victor over reli- gion. Jesus as Christ can only save as a new reality, Tillich's New Being. [Since a Messiah might be] worshiped for himself, becoming a Demon, a symbol of Godmanhood needs to be self-sacrificing ("Believe not in me, but in God who sent me)."
One is saved by being transformed from ones estrangement. Asking about salvation is the 1st step. Hence, Jesus forgives sinners, lifts the Law's burden, & shares in the despair of those who can wreck their own natures by rejecting God who created them. One accepting forgiveness is able to forgive oneself, & to respond to God with love, [& is reconciled]. One is reunited with God, & other people in community, which means healing, physical, mental & social wholeness. Christ as resurrected shows that through reunion with God's eternal life, Godmanhood isn't conquered by death or alienated by the hostility of estranged creation.
[Kingdom of God: Father and Prodigal Sons]—One who is saved participates in the spiritual community of those who are animated by the same Abba-crying Spirit of reunion that was in Jesus as Christ; the latent church, with its body of myth & symbolism to carry the power of Christ's revelation. "Without [power-filled] symbols in which the holy is experienced as present, experiencing the holy vanishes."
Mr. Diana was initially unchurched, even though he belonged to a reli- gious organization. At his death, though far away from fellow-believers, he was a church member with his ancient prayer: "Our father, which art in hea- ven ..." The church as human community is as subject to estrangement as is any other community, all claims to infallibility notwithstanding. Only conti- nuing, self-correcting protest to all such claims keeps the church from being idolatrous. Tillich stands at the boundary between religion & politics, neither exiling God from politics, or consecrating any political order. What is the re- lation of God's Kingdom to temporal society?
[In using the father-family analogy for God's Kingdom], the father is the family's head—a structure of a human community with a power-hierarchy. The father, because of maturity, has natural authority over his sons, & [strug- gles to] use compulsion without impairing individuality of the children he must protect. Every son has suspected that his father uses power on his own be- half rather than for the children, & that the family smothers rather than fosters ones own powers. Prodigal sons ask for their inheritance & leave home. Elder sons don't question, but often feel that his sense of justice is offended when partiality is shown to the prodigal on his return. The father is presented with the dilemma between weakness & destructive coercion, & between rigidity & partiality.
Dilemmas of power & justice were resolved by the father through love. Love [transforms power into reunion & justice into healing forgiveness]. God's Kingdom is a creative & energizing process; it isn't static perfection in a tangi- ble Utopia. Tillich criticizes pacifism; it assumes too easily a desirability of achieving conflictless, untragic unity among men where growth is sacrificed to agreement. In demonic pacifism, peace is corrupted to passivity & consen- sus to "groupthink." "It is progress' price that there can never be complete consensus. All creative advances are essentially a departure from agreed- upon ways of looking at things ... " (William H. Whyte, Jr.).
[The human family] will always have its prodigal sons. [Disunity within the Society of Friends was caused by] tensions between Inward Light's unity and formalism, rationalism and moralism. The Kingdom of God wears its crown of thorns among & within us now. Tillich's thought energizes the mind to wrestle with his views. [It does not cover] the nature of the Holy Spirit or the individual's sanctification. Tillich writes: "To live serenely and courage- ously in these tensions and to discover finally their ultimate unity in the depth of one's souls and in the depth of the divine life is the task and the dignity of human thought."
Suggested Tillich Reading: Dynamics of Faith; Systematic Theo- logy; The Courage to Be; The Shaking of the Foundation; The New Being
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100. Gifts of the True Love: Based on the Old [1780] Carol 12 Days of Christmas (by Elizabeth Yates; 1958)
About the
Author &
Artist—Elizabeth
Yates
(1905-2001)
is the award-winning author of books for young people &
adults. Born
in Buffalo, educated here &
abroad, she married William McGreal &
lived in London 10 years, where she met Nora
Unwin (1907-1982).
Nora
was born &
educa- ted in England; she
got a diploma in Design &
Engraving from the Royal College of Art. She has illustrated over 60
books for English &
US publishers, including 5 of her own. She
illustrated 2 pages, &
the beginning letter of seve- ral sections in
this pamphlet.
The Keynote/
"12
Days of Christmas" List:—At
Christmas, in the midst of thoughtfulness, care, sacrifices,
originality
in
gift-giving, it is strange to think there should be something more, &
baffling not to be able to say what it is.
The
carol "12 Days of Christmas" is
a memory game, and was as much a part of holiday tradition as
mistletoe and holly and plum pudding. The carol was sung after the
wassail bowl had gone round and round.
The
12 days after Christmas were thought to set the weather pattern for
the whole year. The ancient carol offers [True Love's intangible
gifts, &]
itself as a 12-step
meditation,
each
one leading to the next as the months of the year lead one into the
next. These gifts are pictures in outline—[a kind of
connect-the-dots drawing where]
the outline [of an image] appears. What- ever else happens is up to the
person seeing the image emerge. This is entirely purposeful, for to
show too much might impose rather than elicit. At a time of outward giving, inward acceptance has become requisite.
A
partridge in a pear tree [Quiet,
Solitude];
2 turtle-doves [Love
for its own sake];
3
French hens [Style];
4 colly [coal-black] birds [Imagination, Free- dom from Old Patterns];
5 gold rings [Perceptiveness,
Focusing on a Single Piece of Creation];
6
geese a-laying [Creativity];
7 swans a-swimming [Rest,
Flowing with the Current];
8 maids a-milking [Skill
in Daily Labors];
9 ladies dancing Sacremental
Daily Labor];
10 lords a-leaping [Leap
of Faith];
11 pipers piping [Encouragement,
Remembering our Deep, Natural Roots]; 12 drummers drumming [Integrating
Gifts into Life].
A Partridge
in a Pear Tree—It
is an unusual combination, this 1st gift of the True Love's. What
is a partridge and a pear tree doing together? The partridge must have had to fly into the branches of the tree to get
where he is and to settle down as he has. He looks content, alert but
not wary; he must feel safe. By being out of place he's safe. A pear tree is neither his habi- tat nor his larder, but it is a vantage point from
which he can survey the scene scene around him. [He
has left his place, with its familiar dangers &
delights],
with deliberate intent.
A
partridge alone
in
a pear tree
is a pretty picture, a quaint image. How
does the image of a
partridge &
a pear tree speak
to this age? The
partridge
had
to leave his natural surroundings to seek and find his extraor- dinary pear tree. [Once found], it cannot be approached in an ordinary
man- ner; wings are needed to reach it.
2 Turtle
Doves—Flying
through the air, graceful & swift, their grayish wings made a
whistling sound along with the low calling to each other. It broke the long stillness and hold of winter. The turtle doves marked a
turning in the year. They
sit on a branch, discussing their own affairs, admiring each other as if they had just realized their delectable qualities, touching and
cooing, scarcely containing
their emotions. Their song was a very old song, but they liked it and it said what they wanted to say.
Flying
down, they thrust a collection of twigs haphazardly into a con- venient
place and called it home. [They
almost constantly expressed affec- tion], and the warm sound of it
[filled and] moved on the spring air. Of course they overdid it;
[they probably readily admit it].
They made each other feel wonderful and
needed. Whatever [daily dove-duty] each one did it gave them something to coo about. Who
says love gets in the way?
3 French Hens—They
came across a field of greening grass, one be- hind the other, lifting
their legs carefully. One
might dart off [or pause in pur- suit of a meal &
then] rejoin the others as if nothing had [happened]; they moved on, walking sedately, rhythmically. They
weren't plain hens, that was easy to see. They were French hens; they
had style &
savoir-faire.
[They walked gracefully, daintily, &
sure-footed], as if the ground were a cobweb tightrope.
[They drank
at the same time from a puddle],
savoring the
water's deli- ciousness. Inscrutable
guardians of their thoughts, they inspected everything within their
range with intense interest; what
was within their orbit they would do in
style, what was beyond it wouldn't perplex them. They found the exactly [right] place to rest, where earth was soft enough for
them to make 3 small hollows. A remote, glassy
look stole
over their eyes; each retired into her own sphere. To be a hen was
momentous enough
to
rule out other consi- derations.
4 Colly
Birds—Out
of the morning they flew, their black feathers shi- ning in the strong,
warm April sun; they
landed &
sang with the ecstasy of the day. Something about them symbolized
escape from the prisoning pat- tern of daily living. The birds rose one
by one &
soared skyward, impelled by wind [& warm air currents, joined by a 5th,]
the one to whom they had been sent. The
only sound was that of rushing wings; the only power was the wings' power.
They cut through time &
space. No frame enclosed a single view; the rim of the earth's
turning showed everything held within it to be neatly fitting parts of a related whole. The pattern that gave
order &
purpose was an em- brace within which the business of living could be
pursued. Desire to be part of the pattern seemed as [compelling] as
the force of the air. Ecstasy
shook them as the landscape became more familiar.
5 Gold
Rings—How
do I use or invest gold pieces rightly? Which need most deserves the
expenditure
of a gold piece? How
do I keep the rest safe? These
are shining
circlets
of gold, showing no sign of the fire & beating they have been
through. Each
one is a symbol. As
wedding rings they hold the assurance of joy & bliss, sorrow & sacrifice, the depth of fulfill ment and satisfaction. Each ring can serve as a little frame through which a nearby flower or
distant mountain may be seen in sharp focus, & for what it is in
itself. Look
through the golden circle. A perceptiveness undreamed of takes over
vision, an understanding which had not been thought possible floods
the mind. Something like a ring of light surrounds the object looked at; the
object can now be returned to its surroundings.
6 Geese
A-laying—They
settled themselves in a pile of yellow straw & went about the work for which they were intended. Serious
business was before
the 6
geese, that required full concentration of mind, body &
heart, [& allowed for no distractions]. Something beyond them yet of them had
taken possession for a time. Yielding themselves to it, they put
aside requirements of immediate existence and made their link with all geese, [past, present, &
future], &
with the eternal.
However
difficult creating might be, each one knew that built within her was
all that was necessary to sustain the effort. [With the laying], each goose
experiences
discovery's
joy, creation's
rapture, each goose feels
the need of protection for her egg. Within her own being, within
a stillness of her own making, the work had been commenced; through acceptance of the discipline required it had been accomplished.
7 Swans
A-Swimming—The
high tide of summer has washed over the land. [Signs of surging
growth &
bustling animal and human activity are everywhere]. Singularly
serene through the midst of such busy-ness, the river glides on its
way. Over the river 7 swans come swimming, their black feet scarcely
moving beneath them, only enough [for course corrections].
Secure in their element, they
have no other purpose than to move with the river in slow, lordly,
majestic progress. A
pattern of overlapping v's follow follow the swans, broken here & there by
a webbed foot pushing back the water There are times when one must
go with the river, slowly & at ease, res- ting on the assurance that
there is a current that because it is known to exist can be relied on; the power of movement is
not all within ourselves & never has been. Accomplishment is stayed
[sometimes], but the current flows on.
8 Maids
A-Milking—The
milkmaids wore neat little caps that caught up their hair. Their
merry chatter made them sound like a birds. [As
they ap- proached the barn's threshold], their voices became softer,
then ceased altogether when they crossed it. Their lighthearted
gaiety was [left outside] in the sunshine. Now it was as if they
didn't exist for each other; only each for her cow. Each
one placed
her pail under a heavy udder &
ran her hand over the teats stiffened with fullness of milk, as if to
assure the cows that release was near.
Now the barn was filled with a symphony of streams
of milk hissing against pail sides &
the choric sound of crooning milkmaid voices. Unless touch
remained easy,
the pressure sure, the milk wouldn't flow. Each
maid established a climate within which giving &
receiving became the interlocking parts of one dedication. The
milkmaid left the barn with full, foaming pails. [They reclaimed
the]
light-hearted gaiety that had been left outside in the sunshine.
9 Ladies Dancing—They
were dancing with such grace and abandon that to watch them was to
participate with them. There was something familiar about the dance
and the music, something that reached back to
memories of generations
of women back to the dawn of time. There
was a ceremonial qua- lity to the dance, yet it was not [according to a
strict ritual of time, place, and movement]. Grace was in all of
their movements, the grace of courtesy, as each lady bowed to her unseen partner and to her visible companions.
The
motions were those made by women with their bodies in daily domestic
routine: cleaning; sweeping; cooking; childcare (teaching,
comfor- ting, playing); kneeling; bending; bowing; raising
arms high. The smallest things were a part of the interweaving
pattern, [and left undone would] dis- arrange the whole dance. [Each
lady] moved through her world as through the ceremony of a dance,
enabling
them to make every activity an act of worship. Accepting the sacramental quality of life, they knew the altar before which they served and their ears recognized the music that carried them through
their dance.
10 Lords A-Leaping—Even
from far it could be seen how strong &
young they were, with their disciplined bodies &
vigorous gait; they marched with a zest that was wholly a part of
themselves. When they
found level ground, they threw off their cloaks &
launched into a series of games; skill development was the only
concern. They dug a wide, shallow pit &
chal- lenged each other to clear it in one running leap; only one of
the young lords cleared the pit his first time. They
kept trying until all had cleared [& could wear the laurels of success].
Success brought respect for
the way in which it was achieved. Those who leapt it successfully
after the first try, [did so] by calling out from within themselves
new resources. It was
an invisible force which took each one over the pit and landed him safely on the green grass at the furthest edge edge. Faith
undergirded all motive power; with it obstacles were overcome and
distance brought within bounds. Faith would go the longest part of the way in helping one to accomplish one's leap.
11
Pipers Piping—At
dusk on a cold, short November day,
when doubts arise, & the
question
is, "What
is all the living, working, striving for, when it all comes to an
end?"—11
pipers piping arrived on the scene. At a dark moment, at an 11th
hour, pipers appeared piping. The pipes made little of music and
everything of sound as they moved from dirge to march, from lyric to
lament with ceaseless droning. Screaming
winds were in the pipes, surging seas & rushing streams, lapping
lakes, and forest rain. The hooting, honking, howling of animals was
in the pipes.
Fiercely high, throbbingly low, the pipes spoke not to
the mind but to the
blood, & the blood quickens as it courses through the veins. At its
height, the sound was full-bodied & rugged, lifting the spirit as
forcibly as if a strong hand had been placed under it. The
sound, once it got into the veins, was there to stay; words came
alive in the mind. There would be
dark
days when even the stout-hearted, valiant spirit might despair, but
a pipe's robust remin- der could fan into flame a [weakly] flickering
spark. Remembering a oneness with nature, and how deep ones roots
went was enough to put heart into someone, to give one courage.
12 Drummers Drumming—12 men beat as one. The drumming had within it every sound that might have been heard in the shining brilliance of the winter day, as it rolled up into 1 piece the various gifts the True Love had made throughout the year: QUIET; LOVE FOR ITS OWN SAKE; STYLE; IMA- GINATION [big picture]; PERCEPTIVENESS [focus, small picture]; CREATI- VITY (deep satisfaction); REST (flowing with current); SKILL IN THE WAYS OF WORK; SACRAMENTAL APPROACH to daily approach; FAITH; COURAGE.
There stood the ring of months & within them self-given gifts that were the True Love's evidence. Giving was only ½ the gift; the other ½ was in using & enjoying. [One must turn from] looking back over the past year, & look to the year ahead, with its adventure & unforeseen yet inevitable events. TO BE READY was the last gift True Love had to give. "Report to Duty," the drums said, then the 12-man unit turned as one & marched away.
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