Our inquiries into the nature of futurism and archaism have led us to the conclusion that both fail because they seek to escape from the present without rising above the mundane time-stream. We have seen how a realization of the bankruptcy of futurism may lead—and indeed, in a supreme historic example, has led—to an apprehension of the mystery that we have called transfiguration. But the bankruptcy of archaism may also bear fruit in a spiritual discovery. The recognition of the truth that archaism is not enough is a challenge which may, as we have seen, send the baffled archaist off in the opposite direction down the Gadarene slope of futurism, but alternatively he may respond to the challenge by taking some new spiritual departure; and his line of least resistance is to convert a flying leap that is heading for disaster into a flight that will evade the problem of landing by taking permanent leave of the ground. This is the philosophy of detachment of which we have already observed, without much comment, an example afforded by the Jewish Quietists.
To a Western inquirer, the most familiar expositions of this philosophy are those ‘Leaves from a Stoic Philosopher’s Note-Book’ that have been bequeathed to us by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. But if we follow the path of detachment far enough we shall find ourselves sooner or later turning from a Hellenic to an Indie guide, for, far though the disciples of Zeno may go, it is the disciples of Gautama that have had the courage to pursue detachment all the way to its logical goal of self-annihilation. As an intellectual achievement this is imposing; as a moral achievement it is overwhelming; but it has a disconcerting moral corollary; for perfect detachment casts out pity, and therefore also love, as inexorably as it purges away all the evil passions.
‘The man whose every motion is void of love and purpose, whose works are burned away by the fire of knowledge, the enlightened call “learned”. The learned grieve not for them whose lives are fled nor for them whose lives are not fled.’ 1
To the Indie sage’s mind, this heartlessness is the adamantine core of philosophy, and the same conclusion was reached by the Hellenic philosophers independently. Epictetus admonishes his disciples:
‘If you are kissing a child of yours . . . never put your imagination unreservedly into the act and never give your emotion free rein. . . . Indeed, there is no harm in accompanying the act of kissing the child by whispering over him: “To-morrow you will die”.’ 2
And Seneca does not hesitate to declare that
‘Pity is a mental illness induced by the spectacle of other people’s miseries, or alternatively it may be defined as an infection of low spirits caught from other people’s troubles when the patient believes that those troubles are undeserved. The sage does not succumb to such-like mental diseases.’ 3
In pressing its way to a conclusion which is logically inevitable and at the same time morally intolerable, the philosophy of detachment ultimately defeats itself by moving us to revolt. It does not, after all, provide a solution for the problem which it sets out to solve, for in consulting only the head and ignoring the heart it is arbitrarily putting asunder what God has joined together. This philosophy of detachment has to be eclipsed by the mystery of transfiguration.
As we gird up our loins to take this fourth and last turning from the open road of disintegration, a clamour of disapproving and derisive voices assails our ears; but we need not be intimidated, for they come from the philosophers and the futurists—the ‘high-brows’ of detachment and the zealots of political and economic materialism—and we have already found that, whoever may be right, they at any rate are wrong.
‘God hath chosen the foolish things of the World to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the World to confound the things which are mighty.’ 1
This truth which we can verify empirically is also known to us intuitively. And in the light and the strength of it we may brave the disapproval of futurists and philosophers alike by stepping boldly out in the footprints of a guide who is neither Bar Kokaba nor Gautama.
‘The Jews require a sign and the Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ Crucified—unto the Jews a stumbling-block and unto the Greeks foolishness.’ 2
Why is Christ Crucified a stumbling-block to futurists who have never succeeded in eliciting a sign of divine support for their mundane undertakings? And why is He foolishness to philosophers who have never found the wisdom for which they seek?
Christ Crucified is foolishness to the philosopher because the philosopher’s aim is detachment, and he cannot comprehend how any reasonable being who has once attained that forbidding goal can be so perverse as deliberately to relinquish what he has so hardly won. What is the sense of withdrawing simply in order to return? And a fortiori the philosopher must be nonplussed at the notion of a God who has not even had to take the trouble to withdraw from an unsatisfactory World, because He is completely independent of it by virtue of His divinity, but who nevertheless deliberately enters into the World, and subjects Himself there to the utmost agony that God or man can undergo, for the sake of a race of beings of an order immeasurably inferior to His own divine nature. ‘God so loved the World that He gave His only begotten son’? That is the last word in folly from the standpoint of the seeker after detachment.
‘If the supreme end is tranquillity, of what use would it be to set the Wise Man’s heart free from disturbance by cutting off the fear and desire which made him dependent upon outside things, if one immediately opened a hundred channels by which the World’s pain and unrest could flow into his heart through the fibres, created by Love and Pity, connecting his heart with the fevered hearts of men all round? A hundred fibres!—one aperture would suffice to let in enough of the bitter surge to fill his heart full. Leave one small hole in a ship’s side, and you let in the sea. The Stoics, I think, saw with perfect truth that if you were going to allow any least entrance of Love and Pity into the breast, you admitted something whose measure you could not control, and might just as well give up the idea of inner tranquillity at once.... The Christian’s Ideal Figure could never be accepted by the Stoic as an example of his typical Wise Man.’ 1
The Crucifixion is as great a stumbling-block in the way of futurism because the death on the Cross confirms the saying of Jesus that His Kingdom is not of This World. The sign which the futurist requires is the announcement of a kingdom which will be bereft of all meaning if it is not to be a mundane success. The Messiah’s task on his showing is the task assigned by Deutero-Isaiah to Cyrus and by a succession of later Jewish futurists to the Judas or Theudas of the hour: a Zerubbabel or a Simon Macca-baeus or a Simon bar Kokaba.
‘Thus saith the Lord to His Anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden ... : “I will go before thee and make the crooked places straight; I will break in pieces the gates of brass and cut in sunder the bars of iron; and I will give thee the treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret places.” ‘ 2
How was this authentically futurist conception of a Messiah to be reconciled with the words of the prisoner who answered Pilate ‘Thou sayest that I am a King’, and then went on to give so fantastic an account of the royal mission on which He claimed that God had sent Him?
‘To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the World, that I should bear witness unto the truth.’
The disconcerting words might perhaps be ignored, but the malefactor’s death could neither be undone nor be explained away; and Peter’s ordeal shows how grievous this stumbling-block was.
The Kingdom of God, of which Christ is King, is incommensurable with any kingdom that could be founded by a Messiah envisaged as an Achaemenian world-conqueror turned into a Jew and projected into the future. So far as this Civitas Dei enters into the time-dimension at all, it is not as a dream of the future but as a spiritual reality interpenetrating the present. If we ask how, in fact, God’s will can be done on Earth as it is in Heaven, the answer, given in the technical language of theology, is that the omnipresence of God involves His immanence in This World and in every living soul in it, as well as His transcendent existence on supra-mundane planes. In the Christian conception of the Godhead His transcendent aspect (or ‘person’) is displayed in God the Father and His immanent aspect in God the Holy Ghost; but the distinctive and crucial feature of the Christian Faith is that God is not a Duality but a Trinity in Unity, and that in His aspect as God the Son the other two aspects are unified in a Person who, in virtue of this mystery, is as accessible to the human heart as is He incomprehensible to the human understanding. In the Person of Christ Jesus—Very God yet also Very Man—the divine society and the mundane society have a common member who in This World is born into the ranks of the proletariat and dies the death of a malefactor, while in the Other World He is the King of God’s Kingdom, a King who is God Himself.
But how can two natures—one divine and the other human— be both present at once in a single person? Answers, cast in the form of creeds, have been worked out by Christian Fathers in terms of the technical vocabulary of the Hellenic philosophers; but this metaphysical line of approach is perhaps not the only one open to us. We may find an alternative starting-point in the postulate that the divine nature, in so far as it is accessible to us, must have something in common with our own; and, if we look for one particular spiritual faculty which we are conscious of possessing and which we also can attribute with absolute confidence to God—because God would be spiritually inferior to man (quod est absurdum) if this faculty were not in Him but were nevertheless in us—then the faculty which we shall think of first as being common to man and God will be one which the philosophers wish to mortify; and that is the faculty of Love. This stone which both Zeno and Gautama have so obstinately rejected is become the head of the corner of the temple of the New Testament.
We have now completed our survey of four experimental ways of life which are so many exploratory attempts to find a practicable alternative to a familiar habit of living and moving at ease in a growing civilization. When this comfortable road has been remorselessly closed by the catastrophe of a social breakdown, these four ways present themselves as alternative possible by-passes; and we have found that three of them are culs-de-sac, and that only one, which we have called transfiguration, and illustrated by the light of Christianity, leads right onward. Returning now to a concept which we employed in an earlier part of this Study, we may say that both transfiguration and detachment—in contrast to both futurism and archaism—are examples of that ‘transference of the field of action’ from the macrocosm to the microcosm which manifests itself in the spiritual phenomenon of ‘etherialization’. If we are right in believing that transference and etherialization are symptoms of growth, and that every example of human growth will be found to have a social as well as an individual aspect, and if we are also bound to assume ex hypothesi that the society to whose growth the movements of detachment and transfiguration bear witness cannot be any society of the species we have called civilizations—considering that a disintegrating society of that species is the City of Destruction from which either movement is an endeavour to escape—then we can only conclude that the movements of detachment and transfiguration bear witness to the growth of a society or societies of some other kind or kinds.
Is the singular or the dual the right number to use in referring to the social medium in which our two movements take place? The best way to approach this question may be to ask ourselves another: What is the difference between detachment and transfiguration in terms of social growth? The answer clearly is that, while detachment is a simple movement of sheer withdrawal, transfiguration is a compound movement of withdrawal followed by return. This compound movement is illustrated in the life of Jesus by His withdrawal into the wilderness before His ministry in Galilee, and in the life of Saint Paul by his three years’ sojourn in Arabia before the momentous missionary journeys which carried the new religion from its provincial Syriac seed-bed into the heart of the Hellenic World. If the Founder of the Christian religion and His apostle-missionary had been addicts to the philosophy of detachment they would have remained in their wildernesses for the rest of their lives on Earth. The limitation of the philosophy of detachment is its failure to see that its Nirvana is not the terminus of the Soul’s journey but merely a station on its route. The terminus is the Kingdom of God; and this omnipresent Kingdom calls for service from its citizens on Earth here and now.
In the Sinic terms which we employed near the beginning of this Study, the disintegration of a civilization discharges itself in a full cycle of the alternating rhythm of Yin-and-Yang. In the first beat of the rhythm a destructive Yang-movement (the disintegration) passes over into a Yin-state (detachment) which is also a peace of exhaustion; but the rhythm is not arrested at the dead point; it passes over into a creative Yang-movement (transfiguration). This double beat of the movement of Yin-and-Yang is that particular form of the general movement of withdrawal-and-return on which we stumbled near the beginning of our study of disintegration and which we then called Schism-and-Palingenesia.
The literal meaning of the Greek word ‘palingenesia’ is ‘recurrence of birth’, and the term has in it an element of ambiguity. Do we mean the birth again of something which has been born before: for instance, the replacement of an irretrievably damaged civilization by another of the same species? That cannot be what we mean, for that is the aim, not of transfiguration, but of a movement confined within the time-stream—neither archaism nor futurism as we have hitherto used these terms but another movement of the same order. Palingenesia in this sense would be the Wheel of Existence, which the Buddhist philosophy takes for granted and seeks to break by a withdrawal into Nirvana. Yet palingenesia cannot mean the attainment of Nirvana, for the process by which this state of negativity is reached cannot be conceived of as a ‘birth.’
But if palingenesia does not mean the attainment of Nirvana either, it can only mean the attainment of another supra-mundane state to which the image of birth can be illuminatingly applied because this other state is a positive state of life—though one in a higher spiritual dimension than the life of This World. That is the palingenesia of which Jesus speaks to Nicodemus:
‘Except a man be born again he cannot see the Kingdom of God’; and which He proclaims elsewhere as the sovereign aim of His own birth in the flesh:
‘I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.’
The theogony which the Muses had once recited to Hesiod, the shepherd of Ascra, at the moment when a growing Hellenic Civilization had been bursting into flower, finds its antiphony in another theogony which was sung to shepherds of Bethlehem by angels at a moment when a disintegrating Hellenic Society was suffering the last agonies of its time of troubles and was falling into the coma of a universal state. The birth of which the angels then sang was not a rebirth of Hellas nor a new birth of other societies of the Hellenic species. It was the birth in the flesh of the King of the Kingdom of God.