MAN is insufficient for himself, not only by the ill use he has made of himself, but in any event. There must be clarity here. So many of our troubles flow from a defective use of the intelligence or will or energy we have, that we are in danger of thinking that all our troubles could be cured by a better use of our own powers— in other words that man has the secret of sufficiency within himself if he will but use it. But apart from failings that we can do something about, there is a radical insufficiency in us flowing altogether from our being. Man is insufficient without God because without God he would not even be. It is easy for man to think himself autonomous, if he does not think very much: for God does not jerk his elbow, so to speak, but only solicits his mind. But that a being who does not bring himself into existence and who cannot put himself out of existence should think that it is by any power of his own that he is maintained in existence is a sign that his mind must be engaged upon other matters. For fullness of being, man must have a knowledge of and a co-operation with that which maintains him in existence, that which is the very condition of his being at all. To be wrong about that, is to be wrong about oneself— to see oneself as one is not, to act as one is not, to aim at what is not (which means loving things for what they are not). There is an abyss of nothingness at the very heart of our being, and we had better counter it by the fullest possible use of our kinship with the Infinite who is also at the very heart of our being. To be ignorant of this is to live in unreality, and there can be no satisfaction for ourself or any adequate coping with anything.
Apart from the will of God, man's action is doomed to frustration, since the ground-rule of all things—of man himself who acts, of that upon which he acts, of the universe within which he acts—is the will of God. We cannot thwart God's will. We can disobey His laws, but this does not frustrate them, it frustrates us. We can glorify God's will in two ways— by obeying it, in which event we glorify ourselves too; or by disobeying it, in which event we degrade ourselves. God's glory is not in question: only ours. That is why the end does not justify the means: morally, of course, it is not permissible to use evil means to obtain a good result, more profoundly still it is not possible to achieve a good result by evil means. It may succeed for the moment, as opium may give pleasure for the moment; but in a universe directed by supreme intelligence and supreme goodness, evil means of themselves must produce an evil result. Nisi Dominus frustra. Without God there is only frustration. So reason shows. So history shows.
But there is not only frustration of man's action when it is not in harmony with God's will. There is a profounder frustration in our very being itself, showing most obviously in our highest faculties, mind and will.
The mind is doomed to unsatisfaction unless it sees things in God. It sees everything wrong: there are so many things it cannot see at all, that it cannot get the meaning of the things it can see. It is living in a world of bits and pieces; and that hunger for order, which the mind has because it is a mind, cannot be satisfied by an order of bits and pieces. Nor is that other hunger of the mind, the hunger for purpose, in any better case. The mind if it be sufficiently active can propose to itself all sorts of immediate purposes, short-range sectionalized purposes; but it can have no over-all sense of what reality is all about, and is ultimately brought to a standstill by a sense of futility.
Similarly the will is doomed to unsatisfaction in so far as it aims at things separate from God. By the will we move towards things, love them, desire to make them our own. As a matter of plain experience we can fix our heart's desire anywhere between nothing and the Infinite. But without God, all things To love things without loving God means loving shadows and expecting from shadows what only reality can give. One most tragic result is the disappointment of men and women in each other, each expecting what the other cannot give. That is the reason for the horrible disproportion between the ravenous not-to-be-denied hunger and the enjoyment. The shadowiness of things apart from God, which we see at its most piercing in the relation of men and women, is in fact generalized over all life. It is hard to tell whether the poets mourn more for the pleasure that vanished too soon or the pleasure that lasted too long. Let a sunset or a piece of music be as beautiful as we can conceive, we find it hard to go on contemplating the beauty of a sunset even for the short while that the sun takes in setting, and we should be driven quite mad by the music half a dozen times repeated without interval. The mind shudders and the will fails at the thought of seeing any play one half as often as we hear Mass. But there is no weariness for mind or will in the Mass.
So far we have been considering the total absence of God from man's conscious relation with reality. Total absence is hardly the phrase for what we may take as the general state of the world we live in. For the most part it does not actually deny that God is. But if it has not forgotten that He is, it has so largely forgotten what He is, that it can see no function for Him and therefore in the actual conduct of life tends more and more to omit Him. There is only a step from this to actual atheism, and a sufficient number of men have already taken that step. Let us at least take account of what must follow. Omitting God leaves man on top, but of a diminished universe, and to live in a diminished universe diminishes oneself. To take a rough analogy: if we choose to ignore music and poetry, then we are not humbled by the comparison of our own more mediocre equipment with the greater power of the musician and the poet: our ego is spared that wound. But we are not fed by their music and their poetry.
Cutting off the head leaves the neck on top, but of what a body.
Ignoring the head, leaving it unused, is almost as bad:
there are so many things the head can do that the neck cannot.
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The frustrations, the hungers, the despairs are facts that men can see by observing men, even if they do not know the reason for them. Let us look a little at that sense of futility which can bring all action close to a stop. We are wholly caused by God. So is everything else. Therefore without God everything is literally inexplicable, not only in the sense that men cannot find the explanation, but that there isn't one. Therefore, again, apart from the knowledge of God, man really is doomed to live in a meaningless universe, and he can but grow weary of the effort to live a meaningful life in a context that has no meaning. Not knowing God, he does not know what he is; equally he does not know what he is here for, where he is supposed to be going, how to go there. He is on a journey, but does not know his destination, has neither a map of the road nor the rules of the road. Lacking this indispensable knowledge, men occupy themselves with other matters, beer or women or rare stamps or science. One man for instance is a great authority on butterflies. Upon his subject he will talk endlessly and with an admirable enthusiasm. But interrupt his discourse on butterflies to ask him what he knows about himself and where he is supposed to be going and how: he will answer that those are religious questions, and that he has no time for them, being so deeply engaged with butterflies. The thing is farcical but terrifying. One can make no sense of a man who gives so much attention to butterflies that he has none left for his own meaning. The little creatures should be flattered. But the man is hardly sane. And he is the perfect type of our world.
One calamitous result of this unawareness that the road of life leads anywhere in particular is that hope dies. "Most men," says Thoreau, "lead lives of quiet desperation". I do not know how true that was of his generation, but it is fiercely true of ours. Note that it is quiet desperation: not so much active despair as the absence of hope. Men live from one day to the next, hoping that tomorrow may be a little better than today, or if not better then not much worse, occasionally stimulated a little by some extra surge of hope that this or that venture, intellectual or financial or athletic or amatory or what you will, may turn out well. But for most men even these hopes are impermanent, and just as there is no over-all purpose in life, so there is no over-all hope. They are not living toward anything. There is no great thing in the future drawing them on: no goal. Occasionally a whole society will have some such surge of hope as we have noted in the individual. It may be a new social or political creed that makes life seem purposeful; or new techniques that give men a sense of mastery that is wholly intoxicating. For a long moment the air is electric with new hope. But new creeds become old creeds and the fire dies out of them; man's limitations lie sickeningly in wait for him and the illusion of mastery is seen for mockery. The golden moment passes and hope with it. But hope and vitality are bound up together; where hope grows pallid, vitality weakens; where hope dies, vitality dies. Nor do men have to be aware of their own lack of hope to be devitalized by it. Men have died of malnutrition who never heard of vitamin B. Men are dying from lack of hope who do not even know that they are hopeless. The hold upon life is pretty precarious when men are living only for lack of any specific reason for dying.
This devitalization is contributed to by something else, resultant like hopelessness from ignorance of life's meaning. The hopelessness results from not knowing the goal of life's road; this second weakness results from not knowing the rules of the road. Where God is not sufficiently realized, men find themselves without any standards by which to decide the rightness or wrongness of conduct. What of conscience? That there is an inner voice telling us that we should or should not do thus or thus, is a pretty universal experience, but the experience may be misinterpreted. Conscience is not the voice of God but of our own intellect. Yet God is not for nothing in it. Our intellect is judging by a standard, and primarily the standard is the law of God written in our nature. God did not first make us and then impose laws: He made us according to laws, so that the laws find their expression in the way we are made; and actions contrary to them tend to provoke a revolt in our nature, and the intellect expresses the revolt in the judgments we call conscience. The trouble is that we are no longer as God made us: the generations have introduced distortions, so that no one of us has in his nature a clear clean copy of God's law. The intellect, if it judges only by the smudged copy we have within us, can judge wrong. For certainty, we need also the objective statement of His law for us— that God has given the ten Commandments, the teaching of the Church. Conscience must always guide us, yet, if the intellect has not this surer knowledge of God's law, conscience may guide us wrong. But either way— known in its totality or only in part— God's law is the foundation of the intellect's moral judgments.
Whether this is grasped or not, a moral code must be founded on something. A society can accept a moral code without any conscious awareness of its foundation, provided the code is of long standing and not questioned. But in a generation like ours where everything is questioned, the foundation must be clearly seen; and apart from God the foundation cannot be clearly seen. The practical result for the average man of our generation is that when he is faced with what his grandparents would have called a temptation, he has nothing to judge it by. His first reaction is "Why shouldn't I?" Conscience may put up a brief resistance; but conscience, as we have seen, is the judgment of our intellect and it is precisely our intellect that is confused; and in any event our modern man will have heard half a dozen theories to explain conscience away. All this is too weak a barrier against any really strong rush of temptation.
From the initial "Why shouldn't I?" he passes with an uneasiness too slight to affect his decision to "I don't see why I shouldn't". As we have already seen, this last statement is precise almost to the point of pedantry. He does not see why he shouldn't: he does not see anything, because he has turned out the lights, or had them turned out for him: he is simply conscious of a lot of urges and appetites in the dark and there is no mistaking their direction.
There is no mistaking their direction. It is the line of least resistance. It is the following of one's inclination: it is the avoidance of suffering, the avoidance of effort. For our special consideration here it is the avoidance of effort that matters. Even if the moral law had no foundation at all, it still remains true that the will whose only rule is to avoid effort must grow flabby and unmuscular.
This simple principle—
I don't see why I shouldn't—
so sane, so reasonable,
begins by justifying divorce and birth control;
it has already gone on to justify all sorts of abomination;
it has not ended yet.
Yet in the absence of a moral law explicitly forbidding them,
why should the will fight against the things which promise pleasure?
The few might be willing to impose a discipline upon their own desires,
not in the interests of morality but in the interests of spiritual fitness,
of well-toned spiritual muscles.
But not the mass of men.
For them, unless there is the clearest and most compelling reason against,
there can be only the following of inclination, the avoidance of effort, flabbiness
and unmuscularity of soul.
But those qualities in the soul as in the body lead to a general sense of un-fitness,
in plain words reduced vitality.
Men thus devitalized by their own softness, by the lack of a goal for their
hope, by a sense of futility,
can still respond to a major stimulation like war;
but under the quieter stimulations of peace they are in danger of complete
collapse.
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Naturally a generation living a devitalized life, half wasted in looking for happiness where it is not and avoiding suffering that cannot be avoided, is not happy. It may be only a minority that is definitely unhappy; but the mass of men are quite definitely not happy. Unhappiness is always unused or ill-used spiritual energy; and man has within himself so many energies made for God that lacking God these energies cannot be satisfied, and can only turn in upon the man and rend him. There are moments when one feels that if one wanted to fill out the definition of man into a description, one might say first that man is a rational animal who can despair. Yet there is a worse state than despair. The moral theologians tell us that there are two sins against hope, despair and presumption; we might as truly say that there are two alternatives to despair, hope and apathy. By hope we rise above it; by apathy we fall below it. Despair is one particular form of unhappiness resulting from spiritual energy unused; but where there is no spiritual energy, there is no unhappiness. There is nothing. There are people whose minds and wills have so few hungers and so unacute that they are not actively unhappy. They would probably regard themselves as happy if asked, because their spiritual energies are so reduced that they are not conscious of, still less tormented by, their unsatisfaction. But no one would mistake that for happiness who knows what happiness is. Happiness is not to be defined as the absence of unhappiness. It is a splendour resultant from spiritual energies functioning at their maximum. The man has sunk low who has neither God nor despair. Therefore one service we can render men is to make them see the face of their own hopelessness. A man who does not even know that he is hungry will not make the effort for food.
An unhappy generation has of necessity to distract itself from its own emptiness. Since the beginning of the world, men have sought distraction in sin; our own world has found a further distraction, special to itself, in science. Take science first. It is incredible how long science has succeeded in keeping men's minds off their fundamental unhappiness and its own very limited power to remedy their fundamental unhappiness. One marvel follows another— electric light, gramophone, motor car, telephone, radio, aeroplane, television. It is a curious list, and very pathetic. The soul of man is crying for hope or purpose or meaning; and the inventor says "Here is a telephone", or "Look, television!" — exactly as one tries to distract a baby crying for its mother by offering it sugar sticks and making funny faces at it. The leaping stream of invention has served extraordinarily well to keep man occupied, to keep him from remembering that which is troubling him. He is only troubled. His sense of futility he has never got round to analysing. But he is half strangled by it.
How long science will continue to distract man from his own misery one does not know. But it is a reasonable bet that sin will not pass, especially that sort which makes for the quieting of the mind's appetites by the indulgence of the body. We are concerned here not with sinning through passion, but with sinning through sheer futility. Futility is the gaping wound everywhere. Men are either tormented by it, or without torment have their vitality quietly sapped by it. That is why some men seek to overturn the order of the world by revolution, and these tend to be the most energetic; it is the livest nerve that needs the anaesthetic most. But the majority are not as energetic as all that. Yet they too must have their outlet and there is something about the indulgence of the body, especially sexual indulgence, which makes it the almost inevitable resource of futility. The act in itself is so easy, so effortless. And it gives a kind of reassurance to the battered and discouraged ego. For many a man it seems to mark the only time when he is acting as himself, doing what he chooses, expressing his personality, being someone, being at once himself and lifted above himself. It is only a seeming, of course. In fact, it means a further dispersal of man's powers, leaving him less and less master of himself. It rewards him little, but gets a terrible grip on blood and bone.
How all this affects social life is obvious enough. Men are rational animals who need one another and do not possess themselves. We are fallible in judgment and muddied in will, not clear sighted, not disinterested. Our judgments differ and passions madden differences. Yet social life has to be carried on. It is bad enough for the individual not to know what man is and where man is supposed to be going and how he is to get there; but it is more chaotic still for society. The individual can choose for himself a goal which, even if the wrong one, does satisfy something in him and unifies his effort; society is a mass of individuals, pursuing a variety of goals. Only if men are rightly related to God can they be rightly related to one another. Only to the extent that this fundamental unity exists among men can secondary unities— marriage for instance, social order, international society—be healthy. But there can be no coercion here. Men must freely accept. While men refuse the fundamental unity of the right relation to each other in God, we still have to strive for such success as we can get in the secondary unities. We have, bleak but inescapable, the job of working for a second best. But the real job of the moment is to re-christianize the world— beginning with ourselves, of course, but not postponing the rest of the world till our own christianization is completed.
We must work for the good of the secondary social reality, we must work for
the primary reality.
Either way it is a race against time.
There is devitalization and fatigue in the very air of our world, and spreading
fast.
Death is staring us in the face.
There is no guarantee of immortality to any human order.
Civilizations have died before and time has eaten them.
Our own civilization might die.
No one looking honestly at it can fail to see the danger signs, the possibility
that men may grow weary, beyond the safety point, of the efforts and resistances
life demands.
Aside from the obvious and nameable dangers that threaten, there is the greatest
danger of all,
the danger of nothing in particular, of mere drift, seeing nothing, shaping
nothing, living for nothing.
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