Hope

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 158 of 216 · 20 per page

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  felicity.... But at the same time on the glacis of the New Babel, there arise the launching ramps for missiles, and in its storehouse the ogival nuclear weapons pile up for the universal and total destruction to come.’ Pizzardo was virtually repeating the 1939 analysis of Pius’s Summi Pontificus, though adding the new and terrifying image of a thermo-nuclear apocalypse – a parousia flying in on the wings of intercontinental missiles. The tone was the characteristic pessimism of populist triumphalism, with its Augustinian roots. John, in his opening speech, begged those attending the council to reject this analysis: ‘We are shocked to discover what is being said by some people who, though they may be fired by religious zeal, are without justice, or good judgment, or consideration in their way of looking at matters. In the existing state of society they see nothing but ruin and calamity. They are in the habit of saying that our age is much worse than past centuries. They behave as though history, which teaches us about life, has nothing to teach them.... On the contrary, we should recognize that, at the present historical moment, Divine Providence is leading us towards a new order in human relationships which, through the agency of man and what is more above and beyond their own expectations, are tending towards the fulfilment of higher and, as yet, mysterious and unforeseen designs.’ Pope John’s speech was rightly seen as an incitement to action and an optimistic acceptance of change. Such, indeed, was the moral philosophy of John’s two major encyclicals, Mater et Magistra (1961) and Pacem in Terris (1963), dealing with political and social theory, and international relationships. These introduced some very important developments in papal teaching, since the first implicitly rejected Pius IX’s Quanta Cura and its appended Syllabus of Errors, and indeed a mass of other papal statements on politics going back to Gregory XVI’s Mirari Vos and Singulari Nos. John not only accepted democracy, but took it for granted that most societies would move towards a welfare state. Indeed, he accepted the socialist argument that the assumption of social responsibilities by the State is an extension of human freedom: state intervention ‘makes it possible for the individual to exercise many of his personal rights . . . such as the right to . . . preserve himself in good health, to receive further education and a more thorough professional training; the right to housing, work, suitable leisure and recreation.’ He did not spell out his idea of the

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  By 1870, then, the papacy had achieved a position of total control within Roman Christianity which it had been unable to secure even in the thirteenth century, and it had achieved it in circumstances which seemed to suggest that the overwhelming majority of Christians who owed allegiance to Rome were not only willing, but eager, to accord the Holy See this unprecedented paramountcy. In the dawn of democracy, Rome had erected a popular despotism; and it had done so in a Christian Europe which, in the 1870s, was rapidly extending its dominion to cover virtually the entire civilized world. The papacy had constructed for itself a fortress against modernity: in 1870 it had seemed to enter the fortress with a united garrison, and raise the drawbridge. But the ‘idol in the Vatican’ assumed, and most of his supporters assumed with him, that a time would come when the garrison would issue forth and, in the name of a united European Christianity, complete its universalist mission. ‘To the City and to the World’ – the ancient papal phrase seemed to have acquired a new significance in 1870. But how real was this vision of global Christianity?

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  triumphantly developing a new and liberal form of Calvinism. In Venice, the battling friar Paolo Sarpi had successfully persuaded the authorities to defy the Vatican, and keep the Counter-Reformation out of Venetian territory, which included the great Renaissance university of Padua. The English ambassador, Sir Henry Wotton, thought Sarpi’s Venice might well embrace a form of Anglicanism. In 1616 Antonio de Dominis, Archbishop of Spalato, actually became an Anglican; and three years later he published in England Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent, which told the inside story of how the council was manipulated by the papacy; the book was dedicated to James I. It is significant that Sarpi was in touch with Christian of Anhalt, chief adviser to the Elector Frederick at his court in Heidelberg. The idea seems to have been to create a liberal corridor running through central Europe, from England through Holland, Germany, Austria to Venice, which would cut the Counter-Reformation extremists in two, and ultimately with the help of France impose an eirenic religious settlement on Europe. The marriage between Elizabeth and Frederick was part of this plan, and it was to be followed by Frederick’s establishment as the king of Bohemia and ultimately as emperor of a reunified, liberal Germany. These hopes were reflected in the publication of a number of Hermetic or Rosicrucian manifestos. Their theme was as follows: The Protestant Reformation has lost its strength, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation is driving in the wrong direction. A new reformation of the whole world is called for, and this third reformation will find its strength in Christian evangelism, with its emphasis on brotherly love, in the Hermetic and cabalist traditions, and in a turning towards the works of God in nature in a scientific spirit of exploration. To the third force in England, the heroine, of course, was their princess, Elizabeth, who was seen as both an ecumenical talisman and a patroness of the sciences. Wotton wrote a poem to her, On his Mistress the Queen of Bohemia, and John Donne addressed her prophetically: Be thou a new star that to us portends Ends of great wonder; and be thou those ends. Donne, Dean of St Paul’s, was in many ways the outstanding figure of the English third force during this brief, illusory period. He had changed from Catholicism to

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  though not participating, were in fact, by private behind-the-scenes contacts, able to influence the debates and voting, and their very presence acted as a restraining force on religious bigotry during the sessions. The triumphalist rhetoric which had been so notable a feature of the First Vatican Council in 1870 was conspicuously absent. John also engaged in complicated negotiations to secure the presence at the council of full delegations from Communist countries (the term ‘the church of silence’ was now dropped). He failed with China, and also with Albania and Rumania, but he had a notable success in securing the release from prison, to attend, of Mgr Josef Slipyi, the Catholic archbishop of the Byzantine rite in Lvov, who had been in gaol for seventeen years; and in the event there were, for the opening session, seventeen bishops from Poland, four from East Germany, three from Hungary, three from Czechoslovakia, and all the Yugoslav bishops. John arranged and held the council, which opened in 1962, against strong and persistent curial opposition. His position was by no means all-powerful because, though personally popular at all levels of the Church, he was unable or unwilling to reorganize the Vatican bureacracy. It continued to operate as an independent and highly conservative force throughout John’s pontificate. But he made his wishes clear, and he trusted to the bishops of the council to do the rest. His opening speech, setting out the new papal policy, was apparently provoked by a lecture given to the Lateran University, the stronghold of Roman orthodoxy, by a former head of the Holy Office, Cardinal Pizzardo, in the autumn of 1960. Pizzardo reiterated the message of ‘holy isolation’, the Augustinian theory of the Church and the world, as updated by Pius IX and his successors, and as maintained to the end by Pius XII. It was nonsense, he said, to speak or think of ‘one world’. There were two worlds confronting mankind: the so-called ‘modern world’, which was the City of Satan and the City of God, symbolized and represented by the Vatican – he used the old fortress image again. The world beyond the walls of the City of God, said the cardinal, was ‘the new city of Babel’: ‘It rises on a basis of crude materialism and blind determinism, built by the unconscious toil of the conquered, and bathed in their tears and blood, like the old pagan Colosseum – a ruin washed over by the Christian centuries. It rises up monstrous, holding out before the eyes of the deluded mob of slaves – bringing bricks and pitch for its making – a vain mirage of perfect prosperity and terrestial

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  other: but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country.’ He concluded: ‘Religion . . . must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions.’ And Americans, he added, held religion ‘to be indispensible to the maintenance of republican institutions’. Some of them saw it as much more than this. In the period 1750–1820, Presbyterianism and Congregationalism, the two formative sects of American Protestantism, ceased to be dominant, and, in numbers at any rate, the Baptists and Wesleyans took over. In New England, as indeed in England itself, many well- educated Presbyterians, under the impact of the Enlightenment, became Unitarians; and it was the New England Unitarians who created the so-called American Renaissance, centred round the North American Review (1815) and the Christian Examiner (1824), papers whose editors included William Emerson, the father of the poet, Edward Everett, George Ticknor, Jared Sparks, Richard Henry Dana, Henry Adams, James Russell Lowell and Edward Everett Hale. Harvard, whose staff included John Quincy Adams, Longfellow, Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes, was largely Unitarian. Unitarianism was, to a great extent, the religion of the élite – critics joked that its preaching was limited to ‘the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man and the neighbourhood of Boston’. In fact it had its ultimate roots in Arminianism and the third force, and could trace its pedigree not so much to the Founding Fathers as to Erasmus himself, who saw true Christianity in full alliance with the Renaissance. One could even push it back further, for the idea of human rebirth, the ‘new man’ was the central point of St Paul’s moral theology. ‘Christianity’, wrote William Ellery Channing, ‘. . . should come forth from the darkness and corruption of the past in its own celestial splendour and in its divine simplicity. It should be comprehended as having but one purpose, the perfection of human nature, the elevation of men into nobler beings.’ The declaration of the American Unitarian Association (1853) spoke of God ‘forever sweeping the nations with regenerating gales from heaven, and visiting the hearts of men with celestial solicitations’. The prime instrument in this progressive process was the American Republic itself. Jonathan Edwards had predicted in 1740: ‘It is not unlikely that this work of God’s spirit, that is so extraordinary and wonderful, is the dawning, or at least the prelude, of that glorious work of God so often foretold in scripture, which in the

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Nor would I wish to deny that perhaps God has blessed and admitted him to His presence. For albeit he led a wicked, sinful life, it is possible that at the eleventh hour he was so sincerely repentant that God had mercy upon him and received him into His kingdom. But since this is hidden from us, I speak only with regard to the outward appearance, and I say that the fellow should rather be in Hell, in the hands of the devil, than in Paradise. And if this is the case, we may recognize how very great is God’s loving-kindness towards us, in that it takes account, not of our error, but of the purity of our faith, and grants our prayers even when we appoint as our emissary one who is His enemy, thinking him to be His friend, as though we were appealing to one who was truly holy as our intercessor for His favour. And therefore, so that we, the members of this joyful company, may be guided safely and securely by His grace through these present adversities, let us praise the name of Him with whom we began our storytelling, let us hold Him in reverence, and let us commend ourselves to Him in the hour of our need, in the certain knowledge that we shall be heard. And there the narrator fell silent.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  developed, so that it may remain what it is: a foundation of true civilization.’ To this John added, by way of concluding his political and international philosophy, a total condemnation of racialism: ‘Truth calls for the elimination of every trace of racial discrimination, and the consequent recognition of the inviolable principle that all states are by nature equal in dignity.... The fact is that no one can be by nature superior to his fellows, since all men are equally noble in natural dignity.... Each state is like a body, the members of which are human beings.’ In sum, the two encyclicals represented an attempt by John to align Catholic thinking with the progressive economic and political wisdom of his day, and they thus marked a benign revolution in papal attitudes. John saw the council itself as the beginning of a transfer of power from the papal monarchy to the Church as a whole. It was a parliament of the episcopate and he was a constitutional sovereign. He wished to reverse the process whereby, during the nineteenth century, the bishops had been deprived of their independence and had become mere functionaries of a populist papacy. Indeed, he wanted to go further back still to the abortive conciliar theory of the fifteenth century. It had been argued, at the Council of Basle (1431–39), that Christ-delegated authority lay in the Church as a whole. ‘Supreme power’, said John of Segovia, ‘... belongs to the church continuously, permanently, invariably and perpetually.’ Such power could not be alienated any more than a person could discard his own qualities: ‘Supreme power resides first in the community itself like a personal sense or inborn virtue.’ The Second Vatican Council was a reassertion of this view, and a denial that power could be permanently alienated to a monarchical pontiff; indeed, it took up where Basle had left off. The Vatican II Decree on the Church was, in effect, a denial of the dogma of papal infallibility since it asserted that the true source of authority was plural: ‘The body of the faithful... cannot err in matters of belief. Thanks to a supernatural sense of the faith which characterizes the people as a whole, it manifests this unerring quality when, “from the bishops down to the last member of the laity”, it shows universal agreement in matters of faith and morals.’ The revival of conciliar theory, of course, automatically opened up bridges to both the Protestants and the Orthodox, since in both cases the breach had come because of the failure to allow disputes to be settled by true ecumenical methods. Yet John did not overcome the weakness of conciliar method, a weakness which had been fatal to the theory in the fifteen century. Councils were ad hoc affairs. What was also required

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  in-law, Robert Moffat, was also a puzzling figure: in 1857 he finished the vast work of translating the Bible into Tswana, but he seems to have had no interest in the African background, believing quite wrongly, for instance, that the Bechuna had no word for God.) Livingstone’s initial motive was almost wholly spiritual: ‘Can the love of Christ not carry the missionary where the slave-trade carries the trader?’ His life can be quite plausibly interpreted as a sacrifice. Yet after fame came to him, he left the London Missionary Society for a consulship in East Africa, the government backing his venture with £5,000. He told the University of Cambridge in 1857: ‘I beg to direct your attention to Africa. I know that in a few years I shall be cut off in that country, which is now open. Do not let it be shut again! I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity. Do you carry on the work which I have begun. I leave it with you’ – the speech ending in a shout. Again, the next year, he wrote to Professor Sedgwick: ‘That you may have a clear idea of my objects, I may state that they have more in them than meets the eye. They are not merely exploratory, for I go with the intention of benefiting both the African and my own countrymen. I take a practical mining geologist to tell us of the mineral resources of the country, an economic botanist to give a full report of the vegetable productions, an artist to give the scenery, a naval officer to tell of the capacity of river communications, and a moral agent to lay a Christian foundation for anything that may follow. All this machinery had for its ostensible object the development of African trade and the promotion of civilization; but what I can tell to none but such as you, in whom I have confidence, is that I hope it may result in an English colony in the healthy high lands of Central Africa! . . . I have told it only to the Duke of Argyll.’ In some cases, the missionaries regarded colonialism (and commerce) with open hostility. New Zealand, which the missionaries first penetrated in 1814, was a battleground between the Church, which wanted to create an independent, self- sustaining Maori Christian state – rather like the Jesuits in Japan – and the colonizing interests, which recognized the country as an ideal area for European settlement. Darwin, who was there in 1835, warmly praised the missionaries’ work: ‘. . . all this is very surprising when it is considered that five years ago nothing but the fern flourished here. . . . The lesson of the missionary is the enchanter’s wand.’ Five years later, the declaration of British sovereignty marked the victory of the settlers and

• From The Decameron (1353)

  I shall narrate a hundred stories or fables or parables or histories 4 or whatever you choose to call them, recited in ten days by a worthy band of seven ladies and three young men, who assembled together during the plague which recently took such heavy toll of life. And I shall also include some songs, which these seven ladies sang for their mutual amusement. In these tales will be found a variety of love adventures, bitter as well as pleasing, and other exciting incidents, which took place in both ancient and modern times. In reading them, the aforesaid ladies will be able to derive, not only pleasure from the entertaining matters therein set forth, but also some useful advice. For they will learn to recognize what should be avoided and likewise what should be pursued, and these things can only lead, in my opinion, to the removal of their affliction. If this should happen (and may God grant that it should), let them give thanks to Love, which, in freeing me from its bonds, has granted me the power of making provision for their pleasures.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  group was held together by La Mennais’s strong personality, by personal links – ‘the deep, generous friendship of the kind that is formed in youth and under enemy fire’, as Lacordaire put it – and by the vision of a reinvigorated Church appealing and responding to all the noblest elements in European society and civilization. In many respects, the group at La Chenaie resembled the Oxford Movement, which came together in the same decade, with La Mennais playing the role of Keble. There was the same romantic preoccupation with medievalism, the same tense atmosphere of male celibacy, of intellectual struggle overlaid with high-strung emotions. And there was the same instability of conviction. But whereas the Oxford Movement was primarily concerned with doctrine, La Mennais was obsessed with the social force of the Church. He wanted to make it a dominant element in European society, as it had been (so he thought) in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. ‘Without the pope,’ he argued, ‘there can be no church, without the church no Christianity, and without Christianity no religion and no society, which implies that the life of the European nations is solely dependent on the power of the papacy.’ This was the theory. How to make it the practice? As a young man, La Mennais wanted to revert to the Augsburg idea of the princes of Europe settling religion, and thus serving as the agents of a Catholic-papal revival: ‘The people are what one makes of them, criminals or well behaved, peaceful or agitators, religious or unbelieving, according to the wishes of those who lead them.’ He saw himself and those who felt as he did as the nineteenth-century equivalent of the Jesuits, redeeming the ravages of the Revolution, as the Jesuits had rescued Catholicism from the Reformation. He seems to have thought that the whole of Europe would be Catholic in ten years, if only the princes wished it that way. This Waterloo perspective of the ancien régime restored, or rather of a group of enlightened monarchs applying God’s law to man under the direction of the Pope, did not survive the actual experience of the years 1815–30. La Mennais and his friends grew to hate the Bourbons and the other sovereign houses of Europe; and gradually their slogan changed from ‘the Pope and the king’, to ‘the Pope and the people’. The new, direct relationship between papacy and individual Catholics, which the destruction of Gallicanism made possible, was to be used to align Catholicism with democracy and construct a social identity of interests between the spiritual influence of the Pope and the mass economic and political power of the ordinary people. La Mennais launched his new Catholic social philosophy with a small paper called

• From The Decameron (1353)

  If, therefore, you value the prospect of recovering your lady (not to mention your liberty, which must in any case mean little to you without Iphigenia), the gods have placed the means within your reach, provided you will join me in my enterprise.’ These words restored Cimon’s depleted spirits to the full, and his answer was quickly forthcoming. ‘Lysimachus,’ he said, ‘if this scheme of yours procures me the reward of which you have spoken, you could not have chosen a more resolute or loyal comrade. Therefore entrust me with whatever task you desire me to perform, and you will marvel at the energy I devote to your cause.’ ‘Two days hence,’ said Lysimachus, ‘the brides will cross their husbands’ threshold for the first time. As dusk is falling, we shall go to the house, you with your companions and I with some of mine whom I trust implicitly, and make our way inside by armed force. We shall then seize the ladies from the midst of the assembled guests, and carry them off to a ship which I have caused to be fitted out in secret, killing anyone who should have the temerity to stand in our way.’ Cimon agreed to the plan, and lay quietly in prison until the appointed time. When the wedding-day arrived, it was marked by magnificent pomp and splendour, and the house of the two brothers was filled throughout with sounds of revelry and rejoicing. Lysimachus, having completed all his preparations, handed out weapons to Cimon and his companions, as well as to his own friends, and these they concealed beneath their robes. He then delivered a lengthy harangue to fire them with enthusiasm for his plan, and when he judged the time to be ripe, he divided them into three separate groups, one of which he prudently dispatched to the harbour so that no one could prevent them from embarking when the time came for them to leave. Having led the other two parties to the house of Pasimondas, he posted one of them at the main entrance to frustrate any attempt to lock them inside or bar their retreat, whilst with the other, including Cimon, he charged up the stairs. On reaching the hall, where the two brides were already seated and about to dine along with numerous other ladies, they marched boldly forward and hurled the tables to the floor. Then each of the two men seized his lady and handed her over to his companions, instructing them to carry them off at once to the waiting ship. The brides began to cry and scream, the other ladies and the servants followed suit, and the whole place was filled in an instant with uproar and wailing. But Cimon and Lysimachus and their companions, having drawn their swords, made their way unopposed to the head of the staircase, everyone standing aside to let them pass.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life.” {111} This determinism was not quite as absolute with Marx and Engels as with some of their disciples. Engels declared, “The economic condition is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure...the political forms of the class contest, and their results, the constitution....the legal forms...the political, legal, philosophical theories, the religious views...all these exert an influence on historical struggles and in many instances determine their form.” {112} Stated in this reasonable form, few economists or historians would dissent from such an interpretation of history. What gives the Marxian determinism uniqueness, is the complete moral cynicism which is derived from it. The relation of social classes in society is conceived of wholly in terms of the conflict of power with power. Since all cultural, moral and religious forces are “ideologies,” which rationalise, but do not seriously alter, the economic behavior of various classes, it is assumed that the power which inheres in the ownership of the means of production and which makes for social injustice will not be abated, qualified or destroyed by any other means but the use of force against it. “The first condition of salvation,” declares Trotsky, “is to tear the weapons of domination out of the hands of the bourgeoisie. It is hopeless to think of a peaceful arrival to power while the bourgeoisie retains in its hands all the apparatus of power. Three times over hopeless is the idea of coming to power—by the path of parliamentary democracy.” {113} If this destruction of power seems an impossible task, the Marxian proletarian is consoled and encouraged by the hope that the increased centralisation of power in the capitalist economy, which he regards as inevitable, will make the defense of the owning classes more vulnerable by reducing their numbers, while the increasing misery of the workers will create the vehement energy out of which the revolutionary force is built. While capitalism thus produces both the possibility and the means of its own destruction, the true Marxian does not believe that the process will be automatic. He does not expect to gain control of either the means of production or the apparatus of the state without a revolutionary struggle. If it should be maintained that this social philosophy and prophecy is the creed of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, rather than the faith and the hope of the proletarian worker, it need only be pointed out that, wherever social injustice rests heaviest upon the worker, wherever he is most completely disinherited, wherever the slight benefits, which political pressure has forced from the owning classes, have failed to materialise for him, he expresses himself in the creed of the unadulterated and u are unrevised Marx. The difference between Marx and those who have revised his creed in the direction of a greater optimism is not an academic one.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  The real question is: what are the political possibilities of establishing justice through violence? A certain system of power, based upon the force which inheres in property, and augmented by the political power of the state is set against the demands of the worker. Efforts to destroy the economic power by giving the worker the political power, inherent in the strength of his numbers, are frustrated by the use of the organs of education and propaganda in control of the dominant group, and the ignorance of a portion of the workers. Can the workers overthrow the existing power and come in control of both the apparatus of the state and organs of education so that they can establish an equalitarian world and educate a new generation which will maintain it? The realistic Marxians who have analysed this problem in terms of the comparative resources of power available on each side, do not give themselves to the romantic illusions current among certain classes of intellectuals, who think that a revolution is a fairly easy achievement. They know that the task is not easy, even though they believe the inexorable forces of history are gradually changing the proportion of power and making the ultimate victory of the worker possible. They believe that the increased centralisation of power and privilege will reduce the comparative strength of the privileged groups, that the increased misery of the workers, and of the lower middle classes, will augment their numbers and increase their revolutionary fervor and that international wars, in which capitalism inevitably involves the present social order, will finally reduce the prestige and the power of the national state sufficiently to make a transfer of power possible. These catastrophic predictions, which in the true proletarian achieve the character of a religious hope and creed, have been neither proved nor disproved in any authoritative fashion by the history of industrial civilisation. There is very strong evidence both for and against the possibility of their realisation. The fact that industrial workers actually shared some of the benefits of modern technology in the past fifty years, so that their living standards were raised, compared to their previous status, even though they did not win a comparatively larger share of the national income, and that their growing political power actually forced the dominant classes to yield concessions to them, seems to cast grave doubts upon the Marxian theory of revolution through the increasing misery of the workers. In Germany it led to a new school of socialist thought which accepted the revisions of Eduard Bernstein on the original Marxian doctrines {123} and changed the expectations of catastrophe into hopes of evolutionary progress toward equal justice.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  In the municipalities, in the central government, there has begun the penetration of proletarian and socialistic influence; and really it is a strange conception of human affairs which can imagine any institution whatever, any political or social form whatever, capable of being closed to the influence, the penetration of one of the great social forces. To say that the state is the same—the same closed, impenetrable rigid state, brazenly bourgeois—under an oligarchic regime, which refuses proletarians universal suffrage and under a regime of universal suffrage, which, after all, lets the workers transmit their will to the government by delegates with the same powers and rights of the delegates of the bourgeoisie itself, is to contradict the laws of nature.” {134} Translated into practical politics, this faith has meant a faithful participation in the democratic process, even if the victory of the proletariat must be postponed until it can be gained by the democratic method of winning a clear majority of all parliamentary votes. The participation of the German socialists in the Revolution of 1918 is not really an exception to this policy. That revolution was due to a complete breakdown of the German monarchy under the stress of war. The socialists did not engineer it. Since they were the strongest party they might well have exploited it, and used the occasion of the resulting political and social chaos to establish a dictatorship. What they did was to help in the establishment of a democratic republic in which they were the most powerful but not a majority party, and were therefore under the necessity of collaborating with non-proletarian parties in the maintenance of government. For years they co-operated with their arch foes in domestic policies, the industrialists, in order to maintain the international policy of conciliation under Stresemann. It is interesting to note that differences in shades of political philosophy between continental and English socialists, and between German socialists of the school of Bernstein and those of the school of Kautsky, have finally made little difference in the political strategy of the various parliamentary socialists. The Germans and French always had a stronger Marxian influence in their thought than the British socialists. Fabianism, which gave British socialism its philosophy, had little use for the class conflict. It was an ethical socialism, in which the nation as such was called upon to extend the principles of justice which had been previously accepted in the more radical type of liberalism. The spiritual history of British socialism, as an extension and logical consequence of radical liberalism, is rather well symbolised in the development of the thought of John Stuart Mill, who turned in his later years from individualistic to collectivistic political ideas.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  The moral tension of life is invariably imperilled in this process of religious relaxation. Religion draws the bow of life so taut that it either snaps the string (defeatism) or overshoots the mark (fanaticism and asceticism). The belief that the moral weaknesses of religion may be eliminated simply by increasing religious vitality is too simple to be true. The greater the vitality of religion, the more it may either support or endanger morality. It may create moral sensitivity and destroy moral vigor by the force of the same vitality. Both the resources and the limitations of religion in (dealing with the social problem, are revealed even more clearly in its spirit of love than in its sense of contrition. Religion encourages love and benevolence, as we have seen, by absolutising the moral principle of life until it achieves the purity of absolute disinterestedness and by imparting transcendent worth to the life of others. This represents a permanent contribution to the moral life which, despite limitations revealed in the more intricate and complex social relations, must be gratefully accepted as an extension and enlargement of the moral attitudes, usually expressed only in the more intimate relations. “If ye love them that love you, what reward have ye?” declared Jesus; and in the logic of those words the whole social genius of the Christian religion is revealed. The transcendent perspective of religion makes all men our brothers and nullifies the divisions, by which nature, climate, geography and the accidents of history divide the human family. By this insight many religiously inspired idealists have transcended national, racial and class distinctions. The great seers and saints of religion have always placed their hope for the redemption of society in the possibility of making the love-universalism, implicit in religious morality, effective in the whole human society. When Celsus accused the early Christians of destroying the integrity of the empire by their moral absolutism, Origen answered: “There is no one who fights better for the king than we. It is true that we do not go with him to battle, but we fight for him by forming an army of our own, an army of piety, through our prayers to the Godhead. Once all men have become Christians then even the barbarians will be inclined to peace.” {44} It was a natural and inevitable hope in the early Christian community that the spirit of love, which pervaded the life of its own group, would eventually inform the moral life of the whole human race. That hope has been reborn again and again in the history of the Western world. Thousands of Christians, who keenly felt the World War as an apostasy from the Christian spirit, consoled themselves with the thought that Christianity had not failed, because it had not been tried. The implication of this observation is that it will some day be tried.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  By moving to Paris, she could leave both Hugo and Rupert without having to choose between them. She could refrain from fatally wounding either, because she would not be leaving him for another man. She would be leaving to become her own woman. She was giving birth to a new self. She was springing out of the chrysalis. Soon she would be airbound, one last swing from New York to Los Angeles and back, and then she would spring off the trapeze for good and fly to Paris, with a financial safety net that, somehow, she would create for herself. CHAPTER 22 Los Angeles, California, 1965 TRISTINE WHEN ANAÏS WAS TELLING ME about this swerve in direction, I felt disoriented. So much had changed about her life, and Renate’s, and mine, in such a short period. “Tristine, the trapeze is collapsing,” Anaïs cried. I offered to help her write to libraries as Dr. Bogner had suggested, but she waved that idea aside, saying she’d already phoned them, and none had money to acquire her diaries. “I need you to help me figure out another way to get money to move back to Paris.” If there was one thing I knew nothing about, it was how to make money. She surprised me by declaring, “You have what I want. You live independently.” “Well I do it with waitressing, and my scholarship, and student loans. I don’t think you would like living as I do. Maybe you could teach?” “It doesn’t pay enough. I see how little Rupert brings home.” “What about getting some kind of grant?” “I’ve already tried that.” She sighed. “I applied twice for a National Endowment and was denied.” I was out of ideas. I was still trying to grasp her new goal of moving to Paris and leaving the very husbands I had tried to help her hold onto. She would be leaving me as well. As if she’d read my thoughts, she said, “Maybe you could come to Paris, too. You could study at the Sorbonne.” “I don’t think I can leave Neal.” “Bring him to Paris! The Parisians love American jazz.” I knew she was right about that, but I was still trying to adjust to her about-face. I looked at the Bekins boxes along the wall; one was unsealed and filled with books. “Are those packed boxes in preparation for your move to Paris?” “No. Those are for the move into the house Rupert built us in Silver Lake. It’s almost finished. He intends to cement me in place there. Then I’ll never get to Paris!” She seemed to be hyperventilating, but she calmed herself and took a very deep breath. Her neon eyes flashed as she reiterated my new assignment: “Tristine, we need a bold idea. Something to get a lot of money quickly.” “Maybe you could write a potboiler bestseller like Harold Robbins?” I tried. “I have a potboiler story alright. But I don’t dare write it.”

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  Sometimes the privileged classes yield certain advantages because they hope to retard the growth of labor parties or to frustrate more radical demands by labor groups. Bismarck’s social legislation, which remained for some time a model of its kind in Europe, was clearly prompted by the hope of taking the wind out of the sails of the growing German Socialist party. On the other hand such actions as that of Herbert Asquith, when he defied conservative opinion and permitted the first labor government to assume office with liberal support, is a rather clear example of a purer moral motive in politics. Asquith believed that the principles of democracy gave labor the right, as the largest party, to assume responsibility for the government. The opposition to his action on the part of many politicians, who had long paid lip service to democratic principles, but who nevertheless regarded Mr. Asquith’s policy as “treason” to his class, and, of course, to England, clearly revealed the limits of pure principle in politics, and the inevitable influence of class interests upon even the noblest political ideals. It is impossible for this reason ever to rely altogether on reason or conscience in politics. Pressure must be used. If it is gradually applied and the new standard of justice is gradually approximated, there is always a possibility that those who lose privileges in the process will accept the loss voluntarily. If they should fail to be convinced by its justice, and if only the threat of political power should secure their acquiescence, their children may regard it as an established standard of society. So society may move toward the goal of equal justice by gradual and evolutionary processes, in which coercive and educational factors operate in varying proportions. Yet there are difficulties and hazards in the programme of evolutionary and parliamentary socialism, which are not recognised as clearly as they ought to be by those who place unqualified confidence in the parliamentary method. It is not at all certain that political society can fully transform industrial society by an increased pressure in the direction of equality. The chief instrument which it uses for this purpose, taxation, seems subject to a law of diminishing returns. Excessive tax burdens destroy the effectiveness of the weakest units in the capitalistic system and arouse the strongest units to resistance. Steeply graduated inheritance taxes finally force the state to take over productive enterprises or lose the tax. If enterprises are thus taken over piecemeal, it is difficult to develop a systematic and coherent scheme of social ownership and there is a possibility that society will be plunged into a chaos in which the vices of both systems of ownership, private and social, are compounded. Furthermore there is as yet no evidence that a privileged class, which yields advantage after advantage peacefully, will finally yield the very basis of its special position in society without conflict.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  They are specialised and yet typical efforts of a growing human intelligence, to come into possession of all facts relevant to human conduct. If the psychological scientist aids men in analysing their true motives, and in separating their inevitable pretensions from the actual desires, which they are intended to hide, he may increase the purity of social morality. If the social scientist is able to point out that traditional and customary social policies do not have the results, intended or pretended by those who champion them, honest social intentions will find more adequate instruments for the attainment of their ends, and dishonest pretensions will be unmasked. Thus, for instance, a laissez faire economic theory is maintained in an industrial era through the ignorant belief that the general welfare is best served by placing the least possible political restraints upon economic activity. The history of the past hundred years is a refutation of the theory; but it is still maintained, or is dying a too lingering death, particularly in nations as politically incompetent as our own. Its survival is due to the ignorance of those who suffer injustice from the application of this theory to modern industrial life but fail to attribute their difficulties to the social anarchy and political irresponsibility which the theory sanctions. Their ignorance permits the beneficiaries of the present anarchic industrial system to make dishonest use of the waning prestige of laissez faire economics. The men of power in modern industry would not, of course, capitulate simply because the social philosophy by which they justify their policies had been discredited. When power is robbed of the shining armor of political, moral and philosophical theories, by which it defends itself, it will fight on without armor; but it will be more vulnerable, and the strength of its enemies is increased. When economic power desires to be left alone it uses the philosophy of laissez faire to discourage political restraint upon economic freedom. When it wants to make use of the police power of the state to subdue rebellions and discontent in the ranks of its helots, it justifies the use of political coercion and the resulting suppression of liberties by insisting that peace is more precious than freedom and that its only desire is social peace. A rational analysis of social facts easily punctures this pretension also. It proves that the police power of the state is usually used prematurely; before an effort has been made to eliminate the causes of discontent, and that it therefore tends to perpetuate injustice and the consequent social disaffections. Social intelligence may, in short, eliminate many abortive means to socially approved ends, whether they have been proposed honestly or dishonestly, and may therefore contribute to a higher measure of social morality.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  They identify God and nature, the real and the ideal, not because the more dualistic conceptions of classical religion are too irrational for them (though they are irrational); but because they do not suffer as much as the disinherited from the brutalities of contemporary society, and therefore do not take as catastrophic a view of contemporary history. The more privileged proletarians turn catastrophic Marxism into evolutionary socialism for the same reason. Religion is always a citadel of hope, which is built on the edge of despair. Men are inclined to view both individual and social moral facts with complacency, until they view them from some absolute perspective. But the same absolutism which drives them to despair, rejuvenates their hope. In the imagination of the truly religious man the God, who condemns history, will yet redeem history. The undoubted moral resources of religion seem to justify the religious moralists in their hope for the redemption of society through the increase of religio-moral resources. In their most unqualified form, these hopes are vain. There are constitutional limitations in the genius of religion which will always make it more fruitful in purifying individual life, and adding wholesomeness to the more intimate social relations, such as the family, than in the problems of the more complex and political relations of modern society. The disrepute in which modern religion is held by large numbers of ethically sensitive individuals, springs much more from its difficulties in dealing with these complex problems than from its tardiness in adjusting itself to the spirit of modern culture. A society which is harassed with the urgent political and economic problems, which confront our contemporary world, is inclined to be scornful of any life-expression, which is not immediately relevant to its most urgent tasks. In that attitude it may be no more justified than are the religious sentimentalists, who insist that they have a panacea for every ill to which the human flesh is heir. The religious sense of the absolute qualifies the will-to-live and the will-to-power by bringing them under subjection to an absolute will, and by imparting transcendent value to other human beings, whose life and needs thus achieve a higher claim upon the self. That is a moral gain. But religion results also in the absolutising of the self. It is a sublimation of the will-to-live. Though God is majestic and transcendent he is nevertheless related to man by both his qualities and his interest in man. His qualities are human virtues, raised to the n th degree. His interest in man remains even when, as in modern Barthian theology, he is described as the “wholly other.” In religion man interprets the universe in terms relevant to his life and aspirations. Religion is at one and the same time, humility before the absolute and self-assertion in terms of the absolute. Naturalists, who accuse religion of either too much pride or of too abject self-depreciation, fail to understand this paradox of the religious life.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  It may never be completely attainable, but it is the symbol for the ideal of a just peace, from the perspective of which every contemporary peace means only an armistice within the existing disproportions of power. It stands for the elimination of the inequalities of power and privilege which are frozen into every contemporary peaceful situation. If social conflict in the past has been futile that has not been due altogether to the methods of violence which were used in it. Violence may tend to perpetuate injustice, even when its aim is justice; but it is important to note that the violence of international wars has usually not aimed at the elimination of an unjust economic system. It has dealt with the real or fancied grievances of nations which were uniformly involved in social injustice. A social conflict which aims at the elimination of these injustices is in a different category from one which is carried on without reference to the problem of justice. In this respect Marxian philosophy is more true than pacifism. If it may seem to pacifists that the proletarian is perverse in condemning international conflict and asserting the class struggle, the latter has good reason to insist that the elimination of coercion is a futile ideal but that the rational use of coercion is a possible achievement which may save society. It is of course dangerous to accept the principle, that the end justifies the means which are used in its attainment. The danger arises from the ease with which any social group, engaged in social conflict, may justify itself by professing to be fighting for freedom and equality. Society has no absolutely impartial tribunal which could judge such claims. Nevertheless it is the business of reason, though always involved in prejudice and subject to partial perspectives, to aspire to the impartiality by which such claims and pretensions could be analysed and assessed. Though it will fail in instances where disputes are involved and complex, it is not impossible to discover at least the most obvious cases of social disinheritance. Wherever a social group is obviously defrauded of its rights, it is natural to give the assertion of its rights a special measure of moral approbation. Indeed this is what is invariably and instinctively done by any portion of the human community which has achieved a degree of impartiality. Oppressed nationalities, Armenians fighting against Turkey, Indians against England, Filipinos against America, Cubans against Spain, and Koreans against Japan have always elicited a special measure of sympathy and moral approbation from the neutral communities. Unfortunately the working classes in every nation are denied the same measure of sympathy, because there is no neutral community which is as impartial with reference to their claims as with reference to the claims of oppressed nationalities. In the case of the latter there is always some group in nations, not immediately involved in the struggle, which can achieve and afford the luxury of impartiality.