[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
like the notion of narrowing love merely to enjoying sex.
In both cases an incidental, isolated, servile and even secretive
pleasure is substituted for participation in a great creative process;
even in the everlasting Creation of the world.
The two sinister things can be seen side by side in the system
of Bolshevist Russia; for Communism is the only complete
and logical working model of Capitalism. The sins are there
a system which are everywhere else a sort of repeated blunder.
From the first, it is admitted, that the whole system
was directed towards encouraging or driving the worker
to spend his wages; to have nothing left on the next pay day;
to enjoy everything and consume everything and efface everything;
in short, to shudder at the thought of only one crime;
the creative crime of thrift. It was a tame extravagance;
a sort of disciplined dissipation; a meek and submissive prodigality.
For the moment the slave left off drinking all his wages,
the moment he began to hoard or hide any property, he would be
saving up something which might ultimately purchase his liberty.
He might begin to count for something in the State; that is,
he might become less of a slave and more of a citizen.
Morally considered, there has been nothing quite so unspeakably
mean as this Bolshevist generosity. But it will be noted
that exactly the same spirit and tone pervades the manner
of dealing with the other matter. Sex also is to come to
the slave merely as a pleasure; that it may never be a power.
He is to know as little as possible, or at least to think
as little as possible, of the pleasure as anything else except
a pleasure; to think or know nothing of where it comes from
or where it will go to, when once the soiled object has passed
through his own hands. He is not to trouble about its origin
in the purposes of God or its sequel in the posterity of man.
In every department he is not a possessor, but only a consumer;
even if it be of the first elements of life and fire
in so far as they are consumable; he is to have no notion
of the sort of Burning Bush that burns and is not consumed.
For that bush only grows on the soil, on the real land
where human beings can behold it; and the spot on which they
stand is holy ground. Thus there is an exact parallel between
the two modern moral, or immoral, ideas of social reform.
The world has forgotten simultaneously that the making of a Farm
is something much larger than the making of a profit, or even
a product, in the sense of liking the taste of beetroot sugar;
and that the founding of a Family is something much larger
than sex in the limited sense of.current literature; which was
anticipated in one bleak and blinding flash in a single line
of George Meredith; "And eat our pot of honey on the grave."
-/-
ST. THOMAS MORE
MOST would understand the phrase that the mind of More was like a
diamond that a tyrant threw away into a ditch, because he could
not break it. It is but a metaphor; but it does sometimes
happen that the metaphor is many-sided, like the diamond.
What moved the tyrant to a sort of terror of that mind was
its clarity; it was the very reverse of a cloudy crystal
filled only with opalescent dreams or visions of the past.
The King and his great Chancellor had been companions as well
as contemporaries; in many ways, both were Renaissance men;
but in some ways, the man who was the more Catholic was
the less medieval. That is, there was perhaps more in the Tudor
of that mere musty fag-end of decayed medievalism, which the real
Renaissance reformers felt to be the corruption of the time.
In More's mind there was nothing but clarity; in Henry's mind,
though he was no fool and certainly no Protestant, there was
something of confused conservatism. Like many a better man
who is an Anglo-Catholic, he had a touch of the antiquary.
Thomas More was a better rationalist, which was why there was
nothing in his religion that was merely local, or in that sense
merely loyal. More's mind was like a diamond also in a power
like that of cutting glass; of cutting through things that seemed
equally transparent, but were at once less solid and less
many-sided. For the true consistent heresies generally look
very clear indeed; like Calvinism then or Communism now.
They sometimes even look very true; they sometimes even are very true,
in the limited sense of a truth that is less than the Truth.
They are at once more thin and more brittle than the diamond.
For a heresy is not often a mere lie; as Thomas More
himself said, "Never was there a heretic that spoke all false."
A heresy is a truth that hides all the other truths.
A mind like More's was full of light like a house made of windows;
but the windows looked out on all sides and in all directions.
We might say that, as the jewel has many facets, so the man
had many faces; only none of them were masks.
Thus there are so many aspects of this great story, that the
difficulty of dealing with it in an article is one of selection,
and even more of proportion. I might attempt and fail to do justice
to its highest aspect; to that holiness which now stands beyond
even Beatitude; I might equally fill the whole space with the homeliest
of the jokes in which the great humorist delighted in daily life;
perhaps the biggest joke of all being the book called Utopia.
The nineteenth century Utopians imitated the book without seeing
the joke. But among a bewildering complexity of such different
aspects or angles, I have decided to deal only with two points;
not because they were the most important truths about Thomas More,
though their importance is very great; but because they are two of
the most important truths about the world at this present moment.
One appears most clearly in his death and the other in his life;
one, perhaps we should rather say, concerns his public life and
the other his private life; one is far beyond any adequate admiration
and the other may seem in comparison an almost comic bathos;
but one hits exactly the right nail on the head in our present
discussions about the State; and the other about the Family.
Thomas More died the death of a traitor for defying absolute monarchy;
in the strict sense of treating monarchy as an absolute.
He was willing, and even eager, to respect it as a relative thing,
but not as an absolute thing. The heresy that had just raised its head
in his own time was the heresy called the Divine Right of Kings.
In that form it is now regarded as an old superstition; but it has
already reappeared as a very new superstition, in the form of the
Divine Right of Dictators. But most people still vaguely think of it
as old; and nearly all of them think it is much older than it is.
One of the chief difficulties to-day is to explain to people
that this idea was not native to medieval or many older times.
People know that the constitutional checks on kings have been
increasing for a century or two; they do not realize that any
other kind of checks could ever have operated; and in the changed
conditions those other checks are hard to describe or imagine.
But most certainly medieval men thought of the king as ruling
sub deo et lege; rightly translated, "under God and the law,"
but also involving something atmospheric that might more vaguely
be called, "under the morality implied in all our institutions."
Kings were excommunicated, were deposed, were assassinated,
were dealt with in all sorts of defensible and indefensible ways;
but nobody thought the whole commonwealth fell with the king,
or that he alone had ultimate authority there. The State did not own
men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it
sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.
There was an idea of refuge, which was generally an idea of sanctuary.
In short, in a hundred strange and subtle ways, as we should think them,
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]