Great civilizations are the stuff from which historical continuity emanates. Their public institutions are copied far beyond their geographical boundaries, their artifacts treated as standards everywhere, their letters inspire clichés all over the globe. In human geography they function like huge magnets to which all compass needles turn, in human history as the most visible of “the permanent things” providing endurance in the flux of time. Their influence, power of orientation, stabilizing effects continue long after the civilization, at its place of origin, has perished or run out of creativity. “Running out of creativity” is a figure of speech that indicates, within a civilization, elements engendering vision and eliciting imitation, in other words, “permanent things” within that “permanent thing” which is a civilization. We just mentioned the “perishing” of civilizations, the decline of their inner powers of generation and regeneration. Civilizations, then, are permanent only for a while, “Time is killing us,” said Ibn Khaldun, while Vico pointed out a cycle, from barbarism to civilization to super-civilization and to a civilized barbarism which, unlike the original barbarism, is unable to create anything. This latter he called the “barbarism of reflection,” relating it to the degenerating influence of a class of people characterized by reflection apart from faith.

Our country, in a way, is operating as if it were a whole civilization, let us say, like the Roman civilization of old. Whether it deserves to be called “a civilization,” rather than a nation part of a wider civilization, is beside the point. Like Rome, it does provide orientation and relative stability in the world. Like Rome, this country of ours is a concerted effort of human beings held together by common impulses of the heart, the soul, and the mind, and to them these impulses within their civilization come from “permanent things,” such things as “the beliefs which we have inherited from our ancestors, though they give no reasons,” to use characteristic words that Cicero, in his Nature of the Gods, put in the mouth of the conservative Cotta.1 Similarly, the enduring structure of the family, even though confined in each case to a small number of persons, provides the entire civilization with moral and legal standards of sexual relations. And the public laws, both products and pillars of great civilizations, imitate “the ever simultaneous present immutability of God’s life.”2 The attraction of a great civilization comes from more than power and wealth.

In all possibility, of all civilizations ours is the most glittering, most astonishing, most inventive, most organized, most wealth-producing one in human experience. As a network of technology, industry, trade, management, political and private organization, science, education, and services it appears to function with amazing vitality. But at the spiritual, moral, and intellectual core rottenness is visible and expanding. The “faith of our fathers” is not only under external attack, it is also in the process of transforming itself into a narcissist cult of either the human mind, of the self’s feelings, or the exotic imagination. The family is endangered not merely by the flood of divorces, the one-parent household, legally protected abortions, but also by such tendencies as that of Congress to promote “federalized child care,” while, on the other hand, businesses are offering the purchase, rent, and lease of “children as pets and pets as children.”3 The mission of the family as the guardian of sexual morality is undermined by the schools who, from fear of AIDS, distribute condoms to teenagers. Turning to the judicial system, one notes an “explosion of litigation” as judges, juries, attorneys vie with each other in pushing damages for tort, accidents, and even products to astronomical figures, producing a mockery of rationalization by forming concepts like “wrongful life,” and “negligent infliction of emotional distress.” While the law at its end abandons its commonsense limitations, at the end of criminals one finds more and more crimes of violence committed without any trace of motive, “just so,” for the sake of violence itself.

The sexual revolution combines with drug fever to degrade life’s meaning to a series of “highs,” by whatever means; the resultant “subculture” manifests itself by a studied craziness of dress, body painting, hairdo, language patterns, poetry, and music. The word, “subculture,” is in quotation marks because it in itself manifests a widespread inability to distinguish civilization from barbarism, about which distinction there used to be little doubt, even earlier in this century. Another manifestation of the barbarity masquerading as “subculture” is commitment to political causes of great variety which have in common hostility to one’s country, family, and tradition. The “untrammeled freedom” claimed by each individual results also in an identity problem that seems to be without precedent in world history.

It is not that we are wholly without people who are seriously concerned about such developments and consider it their duty to stem the obnoxious tide. But, as they attempt to do so while categorically excluding any traditional or even metaphysical authority, they find themselves drifting. In vain they sit at their desks seeking to produce “values” by a sheer effort of the unaided mind. What they have to offer on the market carries no weight of obligation, which fits an idea-market consisting of an emotional babble of value-idioms, none of them more than a clever guess.

Then there are laws of dissolution. In music, the serialist says: “Thou shalt not use any note more than once, lest it become a tonal center.” In Cubist painting the law is: “Thou shalt not leave the object intact.” In literature: “Thou shalt have no hero to your story,” which is the first commandment followed by the other one like unto it: “Thou shalt not portray any personal character, because there is no truth in any character except that of the ideology to which the person is committed.” Regarding films the law forbids the depiction of reality, since it is nothing but illusions, so that only irrational dreams or actions deserve to be called real. In sexual relations, “normal” is taboo. Moral feelings are permitted, even emphasized, provided that God remains beyond the pale. Patriotism is allowed, but only in the form of a total critique of one’s country. These laws of dissolution have become the hallmark of institutions of higher learning, particularly the most prestigious ones. There they are crowned by a law that declares inadmissible any criticism of this teaching for its premises. The process of dissolution, as can be seen, is not without its own discipline.

In daily life motivation is either confused or trivial, because there is no vision. If we would know where that went which used to orient us in nature, history, and faith we need to ask philosophers and theologians, but they, too, have submitted themselves to laws of dissolution forbidding such concepts as being, natural law, divine grace, truth. The entire tradition of Jesus Christ, his birth, life, sayings, above all his death and resurrection have been pried apart piece by piece and severed from any conviction. Philosophy as well as theology used to begin with something that was implicitly believed by all. That, in modern times, has given way to systemic doubt, analysis, which turned into the spirit of criticism and, eventually, into the mentality of nihilism. If process first took the place of being, process was then deprived of direction, so that, in turn, it yielded to an orgy of meaningless but vehement change, the vehemence taking the place of what Karl Marx called “radical,” the root of things.

What is happening to us is a barbarism of the spirit on the height of intensively intellectual civilization. “Barbarism of reflection,” Vico called it. His description of this state, written in the first half of the eighteenth century, strikes us today as astonishingly fitting our crisis:

Such peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure. Thus no matter how great the throng and press of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure or caprice … They shall turn their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of men. In this way, through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits that have turned them into beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection. . . .

4Two and a half centuries before our time, Vico saw the sway of mindless violence, intellectual dissolution, deep loneliness in the midst of crowds, disordered existence that attends the hyperintellectual stage of great civilizations, the stage where the reflective mind no longer reflects on reality but centers on itself, overreaches its own limits in an arrogance of postulated self-creation. What results is called “lifestyle,” a “style” of vice for the masses, and a style of nihilism for the educated.

Apart from mind and spirit, one cannot speak of misery in our time. There is great and widely distributed wealth, still much opportunity and social mobility, education on an unprecedented scale, by and large international peace in spite of deep tensions, and a universal attitude of shallow optimism. All the same, behind the mask of “fun” there is no radiance of happiness. Materially we are well off, but there is great spiritual restlessness. People look for new cults, although it may also be true that they are not looking for meaning. In fact the quest for exotic cults, bizarre cults, cults of the obscure and the forbidden, reveal that the spiritual restlessness is a search for still further out, not yet imagined degrees of untrammeled human freedom. All the same, it is the spirit rather than the intellect that feels unhappy and neglected. Even the intellect, in some cases, seems to acknowledge that without spiritual vision there can be no understanding that deserves the medieval respect for intellectus, as distinct from ratio. All of which combines to overwhelming evidence that what we need is something we have lost, the good of “permanent things,” that which is higher in rank than what we buy and sell among ourselves, and also higher than anything that most colleges have to teach nowadays.

Which brings up the question of whether it is possible to recapture spiritual anchors and foundations once we have lost them, or, must we say with Lewis Carroll, “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again”? Before Lewis Carroll coined that metaphor, Edmund Burke thought of another, that of the father whom his daughters cut into pieces which they boiled in the hope of thus obtaining a rejuvenated father-person. (I hope the reader will note my “inclusive language.”)

Symbols and Experience

“The Sacred” is the topic given to me for this piece. It is a concept of religion, not one religion but pretty much all religions, as demonstrated in the comprehensive work of Mircea Eliade through which the distinction between “the sacred and the profane” runs like a red thread. “Religion” is a similar concept, and a quite late one at that. It refers to the ensemble of myths, symbols, rituals, thoughts and affects held in common by a multitude who, through this common treasure, become a people. In other words, religion is not something like an object that we use or refrain from using, but we are part of religion which in turn makes us what we are and who we are, both communally and personally. So then, where there are no people united by such beliefs there is no religion; where there is no religion there is no united community. A religion’s symbols can be described but mean nothing to the observer whose inner life is not touched and shaped by this symbol. Even Mircea Eliade’s work communicates no religious spirit to the reader; it is an astonishingly comprehensive survey of religious phenomena, carefully and painstakingly recorded by a positivist scholar, So is the similar but earlier book by Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (1917), the very use of holy asa noun betraying the author’s attitude of looking at it from without. Still, both Otto and Eliade represent the efforts of professional academics to “recover” a missing dimension of their lives. They do it by recording how certain symbols filled people of the past with awe, fear, hope, or trust, these same symbols that for us have sunk to the role of mere souvenirs with which we may at best be linked by a certain amount of nostalgia. They take the symbols in their hands, as it were, fondly, shyly, feelingly, like a middle-aged woman who in the attic finds the dolls that were her childhood’s delight. In vain: no amount of adult affection can bring back the old magic—the dolls remain mere souvenirs. So do religious symbols that no longer represent live experiences of living people, experiences that form the umbilical cord between human souls and the higher reality shining through the symbol. But “The Sacred” is not even a symbol, so it remains at best a thought of a lost way of life but without power in itself to relink us to the lost reality.

By way of a concrete example, let us look at Robert N. Bellah’s Beyond Belief. Bellah speaks of himself as a man who has recovered Christian faith and would help others recover theirs. He emphatically chooses the method by focusing on the symbols, for “in both scientific and religious culture all we have finally are symbols”—spoken as a sociologist to whom science and religion are equally “culture.”5 Thus he looks at symbols from a cool distance wondering “how much transcendence it can be made tocarry for those who have chosen this particular shape to represent the pattern of their religiousness.6 ‘‘Transcendence” here appears to be something like a weighty mass, “religiousness” a pattern chosen among others for no particular reason, the whole process a value-free option. “Religious symbol systems” seem to be lying around, ready to be “appropriated.” Bellah reports about one of many experiments of “appropriation,” this one an Anglican service at Canterbury House in Ann Arbor, Michigan, an event in which symbols of Christian worship were deliberately mixed with symbols of contemporary counter-culture. This is what he has to say about it: “The conventional service today lacks authenticity because it has no surprises; it is not a point at which the world of everyday is broken through but only a particularly cozy corner of it. Certainly the Canterbury House service contained the possibility of opening up ‘new experiences.’”7 It would seem that by “experiences” Bellah meant anything characterized by “strong feelings,” psychological “excitement,” in other words, wholly subjective agitation. Now religious symbols have their origin in profound experience but experiences of participation in non-subjective reality. Here is what, for instance, Jaroslav Pelikan remarked about the generation of Christian symbols of faith: “The time is fulfilled . . . in these last days”: it is obvious from these and other statements of the early generation of Christian believers that as they carried out the task of finding a language that would not collapse under the weight of what they believed to be the significance of the coming of Jesus, they found it necessary to invent a grammar of history.”8 The original event was the encounter with Jesus in which there was formed the belief in Jesus’s divinity. Thomas the Twin said it spontaneously: “My Lord and my God.” The experience, shared by a few thousand Christians, led to common worship practices in which there developed a suitable liturgical language. From the early Christians who had known Jesus the experience passed on through centuries chiefly by personal contagion, as it were, suffering now loss of intensity, then gaining new vigor, but always centering on Jesus Christ “come down from heaven,” and the divine Father to whom Jesus had always pointed, the Unseen Beyond whose pull was the very crux of the experience

Bellah, too, speaks of “contemporary religious consciousness” as having a “strong note of innerness. There is an intense preoccupation with authentic personal experience … with the self.”9 Preoccupation with self is, of course, precisely that in which modern psychology and sociology radically differ from Christianity. On this premise Bellah bases his description of “the most significant religious movement of our time,” in which “Christians can join with non-Christians in the emerging value-consensus, in criticizing existing values … and insisting that values to which societies are committed be actualized for all social groups.”10 He is here speaking of the modern trans-national Protest-movement characteristic of Western civilization, for which he claims a “possibility to recognize the operation of the holy spirit [sic], to use Christian symbolism.”11 In all this, he sees “social science beginning, faintly and crudely, to be able to cope with the richness of reality as religion has seen it … In particular some social scientists have come to feel that there are profound depths in the religious symbols that we have scarcely begun to fathom and that we have much to learn from.”12 Here is the core of the matter. What Bellah defines as “recovery” is really an appreciation of “the depths of symbols,” an essentially aesthetic evaluation. The symbols are appreciated also for their utility, for they “express the feelings, values, and hopes of subjects,” and “regulate the flow of interaction between subjects and objects” or “attempt to sum up the whole subject-object complex or even point to the context or ground of that whole.”13 Eventually, Bellah makes his most extreme statement: “To put it bluntly, religion is true.” The term “religion” here, like “the sacred,” is no symbol but an abstraction, so what can be the meaning of a statement that an abstraction is “true”? The sociologist who forgets his value-neutrality long enough to admit “the value of religion” and also claims to “teach religion” rather than “just about religion,”14 is, in spite of his sense of daring, still worlds away from a live experience of ineffable divinity and the turning-around of the soul which occurs in that experience. The “opening of the soul” Henri Bergson called it when he, with the methods of philosophy rather than sociology, called the “open soul,” and what it opens to, the second, and more important source of morality and religion, the first one being society’s pressure.15

The Modern Zeitgeist

Why did Mr. Bellah not succeed in making the movement for the sake of which he wrote his book? Wolfgang Smith has something to say about that, in his Cosmos and Transcendence:

The crossing of boundaries turns out to be a rather rare occurrence; we must not let ourselves be fooled. It is true, for example, that in modern times there has been an unprecedented interest in the study of history; and yet one finds that it is almost invariably a ci se of history truncated by the mental horizon of our age and colored by the humanistic sentiments of our civilization. The Zeitgeist is indeed a force to be reckoned with, and it is never easy to swim against the stream.16

The Zeitgeist of our age is no mere fad; it is powerfully held in place by three pillars, each the established dogma of an academically dominant science. First, it is the impersonal and mechanical idea of the universe left to us by Newton. As Edwin Burtt described it:

When Newton’s conception of the world was gradually shorn of its religious relations, the ultimate justification for absolute space and time as he had portrayed them disappeared, and the entities were left empty but still absolute land] unquestionably assumed as an infinite theatre in which, and an unchangeable entity against which, the world machine continued its clock-like movements. From accidents of God they became sheer, fixed, geometrical measure for the motion of masses. And this loss of their divinity completed the de-spiritualization of nature.17

The consequence of “the elimination of God from the scene” was the need to do the same for “these residual souls of men, irregularly scattered among the atoms of mass that swan mechanically among the ethereal vapors in time and space … They, too, must be reduced to mechanical products and parts of the self-regulating clock.”18 This image of the physical universe has been “shattered” by the physics of Planck, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, and yet, says Wolfgang Smith, the idea remains with us as “an implicitly assumed background, a mental presupposition that serves to shape and define the general scientific outlook.”19

The second pillar of the Zeitgeist is the vast structure of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, the legacy of Freud and Jung, It places ultimate belief in the unconscious and uses this belief as a battering ram against religion which alone, in Freud’s own words, is to be “taken seriously as an enemy.” Even though where there once was only Freud and Jung there is now a pluralism of psychoanalytical schools; “once the therapeutic mentality becomes dominant within a culture, it is no longer necessary to vituperate against Christianity,” says Wolfgang Smith. Using the language of Philipp Rieff, he argues that “the present ferment in the Roman Catholic Church is less a new theology than a move toward more sophisticated accommodations with the negative communities of the therapeutics” and ends by quoting Rieff as saying: “The sacralist yields to the analyst as the therapeutic functionary of modern culture.”20 The third pillar is the dogma central to the social sciences. That dogma says that quantifaction is the only permissible method of even the sciences of man and society, that facts differ radically from values and only facts must be admitted to scientific analysis. This eliminates from the science of man any theory encompassing transcendence, values, and divinity. There is great affinity between this reduced reality of man and the reduced reality of the mechanical worldview left by Newton. The name for this dogmatic reduction is Positivism, a term coined by Auguste Comte as a bar against metaphysics, and academically implanted by Levy-Brühl, Durkheim, and Max Weber. A perceptive commentator of our time aptly calls it, “operationalism.” With one, again dogmatic, exception (equality) it relativizes all values, elevates all facts to the same absoluteness of relevance, and is as intolerant of the slightest trace of religious belief as the Inquisition was against heresy. Such traces are suppressed as impermissible even in conversation and in the classroom.

The modern Zeitgeist, then, is the combined hostility to religion on the part of three academic and intellectual power-structures, each claiming metaphysical authority without any metaphysical conviction: Physics, Psychoanalysis, Positivism,—the three “P’s.” Chesterton called this “the Mind moving in a perfect circle. . . . There is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity a combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction.”21 We do live in an age of logical and technical completeness combined with spiritual contraction. This does not mean that all spiritual yearnings have folded up like shrunken leaves. It does mean, rather, that most spiritual yearnings seek and find counterfeit spiritualities widely available, the inner emptiness being filled with nothing but jelly. Our question is, what is one to do when “permanent things” no longer are visible, when nothing more substantial than each moment’s “fun” is experienced as that common something that binds individuals into a whole, when such words as “truth,” “man,” “soul,” “nature,” are no longer received as valid coin? We are meeting here under the auspices of words like “renewal” and “recovery,” implying a suggestion that some definable and organizable effort of mind and heart will lead us back to solid ground where we would learn again to do right things, think right things, feel right things. We have seen from the Bellah book that, were such an effort defined as deliberate reattachment to certain historic symptoms, deliberate feelings of awe (as before “The Sacred”), strenuous study of metaphysical treatises, it could not avail. Such words sound like trumpets, but should we not remember that they sound “under the rubble,” within the wasteland that is our present habitat? The rule of the Zeitgeist is nihilistic but it has the logic of contraction, and that logic masses enormous weights of power. If I be allowed to quote myself, I may remind us that the concepts required for any recovery

have been not merely undermined but downright eliminated by modern philosophy, psychology, and anthropology. That means that an attempt to return to the natural law of Thomas Aquinas, for instance, would be tantamount to fetching from afar a text written in a language “not understanded by the people.” We would recover no more than the words. Our contemporaries would not be mentally and spiritually equipped to read these words with sensitivity or even with interest. As for us, who might seek to “return to natural law” by nothing more than reprinting ancient texts, we would stand convicted of laziness.22

Will and Renewal

Metaphysical words, symbols, and even myths are no more than the “outward and visible signs” behind which one means an “inward and spiritual grace.” Even this latter is a symbolic expression for the ultimate inner experience that at all times has been the mode in which human souls, hearts and minds have encountered higher and ineffable reality. That kind of experience alone is also for us the road of “renewal” and “recovery,” provided one does not confuse it with any “experience”; with, for instance, the “experiences” one expects to result from a cleverly arranged social happening, even if that happening “happens” to include a liturgical service. In that sense, the dime-a-dozen experiences for which modern “lifestyles” are angling every day remain empty and fleeting. The experiences big with fruit are those capable of engendering metaphysical insights. For with regard to metaphysics the chief question to ask is not, “What do the texts say?”, “What does metaphysics teach?”, but rather, “How is metaphysics possible?” In the same article of mine above quoted I went on to point to the experiences of Solzhenitsyn and other inmates of the Gulag Archipelago who, in the face of complete individual annihilation, encountered divine reality and the reality of goodness. These Russian labor-camp experiences must be rated as milestone-events of our age.

Were this kind of experience all we could discover, we might feel compelled to wish for ourselves a totalitarian regime so that, in its extremities of inhumanity, we could recover our own humanity. That wish would be as inadmissible as the spiritual extreme in which some early Christians actively sought to bring on themselves a martyr’s death, only to be roundly condemned by the Church. Thus we must keep our eyes open to somewhat comparable experiences that are possible under our cultural circumstances. One of these has occurred among psychiatrists, proceeding with the very methods of their discipline and under the conviction that evil is nothing but a variety of psychic disease implying no fault, who came face to face with the unexpected reality of evil in human will. As one of them put it:

I knew practically nothing about radical human evil. I did not believe in the existence of either the devil or the phenomenon of possession. I had never attended an exorcism. The very name of evil was absent from my professional vocabulary. I had received no training on the subject. It was not a recognized field of study for a psychiatrist or, for that matter, any supposedly scientific person. I had been taught that all psychopathology could be explained in terms of known diseases or psychodynamics, and was properly labeled and encompassed in the standard Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. The fact that American psychiatry almost totally ignored even the basic reality of the human will had not yet struck me as ridiculous.23

Through one or two of his cases Dr. Peck was finally driven to the recognition of the key role of the human will and the choice of evil as a real possibility of that will. Dr. Peck is now a psychiatrist turned Christian by the consistent application of psychiatric methods which led him to “shatter” the Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytical world, just as Planck and Einstein, through the consistent application of Newtonian method, came to “shatter” Newton’s physical universe. Other psychiatrists, those specializing in Multiple Personality Dissociation, have experienced similar encounters inducing them to accept Christian beliefs.

In the case of the Soviet Gulag inmates and the American psychiatrists, the common element is the utterly shattering encounter with radical evil, an encounter that in the ‘forties also brought a good many German intellectuals back to the Christian faith. What about positive experiences, experiences of at least some condition of goodness? Are none of these to be reported? They are, but they come in curiously unrelated forms. A contemporary Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt, had early in life committed himself to twelve-tone serialism which he found to be a part of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land. His way from “under the rubble” led him through the equivalent of the musician’s “abyss,” through complete silence, musical silence, mental silence, spiritual silence, silence observed for years, silence as the soul’s recovery-regime from absolute lostness. As he began to emerge, cautiously sounding first one note, then a repetition of that note, he remained committed to silence as the point of beginning and allowed no notes “unworthy of the underlying silence.” The emerging music turned out to be strongly spiritual, and his latest composition is a Passion according to St. John. One wonders whether Pärt had ever heard of Max Picard’s 1948 hook on silence, but, in any case, two remarkable persons found an original and viable way of personal renewal.

We are not the first ones to raise the question of how to attain “renewal” and “recovery.” I would like to conclude by referring to three thinkers who answered this question in an identical way. First, Eric Voegelin, who more than any other contemporary thinker has thrown light on the link between metaphysics and mystic-philosophical experience repeated frequently the basic importance of the “primary experience of the cosmos,” an experience present at the origin of myth, present as the philosopher’s myth of classical Greek philosophy, and never to be neglected or ignored. Second, a contemporary scientist and philosopher, Wolfgang Smith, speaking about the “twin realms of mathematicized objectivity and an illusory subjectivity” which “together … have in effect swallowed up the entire locus of reality,” so that “beyond we see nothing; we cannot—our premises do not permit it,” gives this advice: “What then is out there that could possibly be seen? And by what means? The answer is surprisingly simple: What is to be seen is the God-made world, and this seeing—this prodigy—is to be accomplished through the God-given instruments consisting of the five senses and the mind.”24 Third, it gives me great personal pleasure to turn, for another, almost identical answer to G. K. Chesterton. He would not be Chesterton if his answer were not to start at the point we would never have thought of by ourselves: Elfland, the realm of fairy tales, enchanted castles and animals, witches, and talking trees. This land is “not a necessity . . . we do not count on it, we bet on it.” Chesterton describes his first two experiences, indefensible and indisputable: “The world was a shock, but it was not merely shocking; existence was a surprise; but it was a pleasant surprise.” What began with the fairy tales of childhood became the basic faith underlying the adult’s life:

I felt that life itself is asbright as a diamond, but as brittle as a window pane. . . . The wonder has a positive element of praise . . . and this pointed a profound emotion always present and subconscious; that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose, there is a person.

The resulting attitude toward the world is describable as the opposite of house-hunting:

No man is in that position. A man belongs to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it. He has fought for the flag, and often won heroic victories for the flag long before he has ever enlisted. To put shortly what seems the essential matter, he has a loyalty long before he has any admiration.25

What Chesterton describes is “faith,” but not in the sense we use when speaking of someone as a Christian, a Jew, or a Muslim. Of his Christian faith Chesterton has little to say in Orthodoxy, he has that reserved for The Everlasting Man, But, and here we may return to Voegelin, it is that basic Chestertonian faith which not only all higher religion but all higher thought presupposes, as a given. When Anse1m composed his Proslogion he saw himself engaged in fides quaerens intellecturn, i.e., in the movement from a basic and given faith to the intellect’s fuller understanding. For without that basic faith, there is nothing to talk about, or even to think about. So that the cosmos, always accessible by means of spontaneous reflection on simple sense impressions, can thus always move us to say: “Why,—there is, indeed, something rather than nothing!” “Why—what there is comes, and goes, and moves in its way and no other!” So there is, first, the actuality of given existence, fact eliciting admiration and praise. Such faith underlies all human experience, as St. Paul pointed out in the first chapter of his letter to the Romans (19–21). The soul that finds itself thus moved by given reality knows itself to be a part, and its movement to be participation.

I end with a final quotation, from a book published in the same decade as Chesterton’s Orthodoxy: William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. Like Dr. Peck, James approached religious experience as a psychologist, a man of modern science, but he reported with utter veracity and an open mind on what he found. Having quoted verbally a great number of different religious experiences, he comments:

Such is the human ontological imagination, and such is the convincingness of what it brings to birth. Unpicturable beings are realized, and realized with an intensity almost like that of an hallucination. They determine our vital attitude as decisively as the vital attitude of lovers is determined by the habitual sense, by which each is haunted, of the other being in the world. . .  They are as convincing to those who have them as any direct sensible experience can be, and they are, as a rule, much more convincing than results established by mere logic ever are?26

James speaks of “the human ontological imagination.” “Ontological,” as is well known, functions as almost a synonym with “metaphysical.” James gives us example after example of experiences that “make metaphysics possible.” Whether he shared the ensuring convictions or not is beside the point. The experiences he described did occur to men and women of about a hundred years ago, people living in our modern times and under its tyrannous Zeitgeist. When I said, earlier, that the road of renewal and recovery led not through an intentional focus on symbols and ancient texts but through relevant inner experiences, I became liable to provide an answer to the possible question: “But—are such experiences still possible in our days?” I hope to have provided at least some evidence that will preclude a simple “No” as an answer to that question.

Notes

  1. Marcus Tullius Cicero, Nature of the Gods (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 194–95.
  2. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy (New York: Carlton House, 1976).
  3. Fidelity, vol. 7, no. 8 (August 1988).
  4. Giambattista Vico, The New Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 424.
  5. Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 246.
  6. Ibid., 204.
  7. Ibid., 215.
  8. Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries (New Haven, CT; Yale University Press, 1985), 21–22.
  9. Bellah, Beyond Belief, 224.
  10. Ibid., 226.
  11. Ibid., 228.
  12. Ibid., 245.
  13. Ibid., 252.
  14. Ibid., 257.
  15. Henri Louis Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1935).
  16. Wolfgang Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientific Belief (La Salle, IL: Sherwood Sugden, 1984), 134.
  17. Edwin Burn, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, rev. ed. (1955), 262.
  18. Ibid., 300.
  19. Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence, 25.
  20. Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 77.
  21. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: John Lane, 1908), 31–32.
  22. Gerhart Niemeyer, “What Price Natural Law,” Aftersight and Foresight (Lanham, MD: University Press of America and Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1988), 261.
  23. M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 178.
  24. Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence, 135.
  25. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 96, 99, 108, 118.
  26. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: New American Library of World Literature, 1958).