Johnny-5

“GOD is Love,” says St. John. 

When I first tried to write this book I thought that his maxim would provide me with a very plain highroad through the whole subject. I thought I should be able to say that Human Loves deserved to be called Loves at all just in so far as they resembled that Love which is God. The first distinction I made was therefore between what I called Gift-love and Need-Love. The typical example of Gift-Love would be that love which moves A Man to Work and Plan and Save for The Future well-being of His Family which he will die without sharing or seeing; of the second, that which sends a lonely or frightened Child to its Mother’s Arms.

There was no doubt which was more like Love Himself. Divine Love is Gift-love. The Father gives all He is and has to the Son. The Son gives Himself back to the Father, and gives Himself to the world, and for the world to the Father, and thus gives the world (in Himself) back to the Father too.

And what, on the other hand, can be less like anything we believe of God’s life than Need-Love? He lacks nothing, but our Need-Love, as Plato saw, is “the son of Poverty.” It is the accurate reflection in consciousness of our actual nature. We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.

I was looking forward to writing some fairly easy panegyrics on the first sort of love and disparagements of the second. And much of what I was going to say still seems to me to be true. I still think that if all we mean by our love is a craving to be loved, we are in a very deplorable state. But I would not now say (with my master, MacDonald) that if we mean only this craving we are mistaking for love something that is not love at all. I cannot now deny the name love to Need-love. Every time I have tried to think the thing out along those lines I have ended in puzzles and contradictions. The reality is more complicated than I supposed.

First of all, we do violence to most languages, including our own, if we do not call Need-love “love.” Of course language is not an infallible guide, but it contains, with all its defects, a good deal of stored insight and experience. If you begin by flouting it, it has a way of avenging itself later on. We had better not follow Humpty Dumpty in making words mean whatever we please.

Secondly, we must be cautious about calling Need-love “mere selfishness.” Mere is always a dangerous word. No doubt Need-love, like all our impulses, can be selfishly indulged. A tyrannous and gluttonous demand for affection can be a horrible thing. But in ordinary life no one calls a child selfish because it turns for comfort to its mother; nor an adult who turns to his fellow “for company.” Those, whether children or adults, who do so least are not usually the most selfless. Where Need-love is felt there may be reasons for denying or totally mortifying it; but not to feel it is in general the mark of the cold egoist. Since we do in reality need one another (“it is not good for man to be alone”), then the failure of this need to appear as Need-love in .consciousness—in other words, the illusory feeling that it is good for us to be alone—is a bad spiritual symptom; just as lack of appetite is a bad medical symptom because men do really need food.

But thirdly, we come to something far more important. Every Christian would agree that a man’s spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God. But Man’s Love for God, from the very nature of the case, must always be very largely, and must often be entirely, a Need-love. 

This is obvious when we implore Forgiveness for our sins or Support in our tribulations. But in the long run it is perhaps even more apparent in our growing — for it ought to be growing — awareness that our whole being by its very nature is one vast need; incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered, crying out for Him who can untie things that are now knotted together and tie up things that are still dangling loose. 

I do not say that Man can never bring to God anything at all but sheer Need-love. Exalted Souls may tell us of a reach beyond that. But they would also, I think, be the first to tell us that those heights would cease to be true Graces, would become Neo-Platonic or finally Diabolical Illusions, the moment a man dared to think that he could live on them and henceforth drop out the element of need. 

“The Highest,” says the Imitation, “Does Not Stand without The Lowest.” It would be a bold and silly creature that came before its Creator with the boast “I’m no beggar. I love you disinterestedly.” 

Those who come nearest to a Gift-Love for God will next moment, even at the very same moment, be beating their breasts with The Publican and laying their indigence before the only real Giver. And God will have it so. 

He addresses our Need-love: “Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy-laden,” or, in the Old Testament, “Open your mouth wide and I will fill it.”

Thus one Need-Love, The Greatest of All, either coincides with or at least makes a main ingredient in Man’s Highest, Healthiest, and Most Realistic Spiritual Condition. 

A very strange corollary follows. 

Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least Like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?

This paradox staggered me when I first ran into it; it also wrecked all my previous attempts to write about love. When we face it, something like this seems to result.

We must distinguish two things which might both possibly be called “nearness to God.” One is likeness to God. God has impressed some sort of likeness to Himself, I suppose, in all that He has made. Space and time, in their own fashion, mirror His greatness; all life, His fecundity; animal life, His activity. Man has a more important likeness than these by being rational. Angels, we believe, have likenesses which Man lacks: immortality and intuitive knowledge. In that way all men, whether good or bad, all angels including those that fell, are more like God than the animals are. Their natures are in this sense “nearer” to the Divine Nature. 

But, secondly, there is what we may call nearness of approach. If this is what we mean, the states in which a man is “nearest” to God are those in which he is most surely and swiftly approaching his final union with God, vision of God and enjoyment of God. And as soon as we distinguish nearness-by-likeness and nearness-of-approach, we see that they do not necessarily coincide. They may or may not.

Perhaps an analogy may help. Let us suppose that we are doing a mountain walk to the village which is our home. At mid-day we come to the top of a cliff where we are, in space, very near it because it is just below us. We could drop a stone into it. But as we are no cragsmen we can’t get down. We must go a long way round; five miles, maybe. At many points during that detour we shall, statically, be farther from the village than we were when we sat above the cliff. But only statically. In terms of progress we shall be far “nearer” our baths and teas.

Since God is blessed, omnipotent, sovereign and creative, there is obviously a sense in which happiness, strength, freedom and fertility (whether of mind 01 body), wherever they appear in human life, constitute likenesses, and in that way proximities, to God. But no one supposes that the possession of these gifts has any necessary connection with our sanctification. No kind of riches is a passport to the Kingdom of Heaven.

At the cliff’s top we are near the village, but however long we sit there we shall never be any nearer to our bath and our tea. So here; the likeness, and in that sense nearness, to Himself which God has conferred upon certain creatures and certain states of those creatures is something finished, built in. Wha1 is near Him by likeness is never, by that fact alone, going to be any nearer. But nearness of approach is. by definition, increasing nearness. And whereas the likeness is given to us—and can be received with or without thanks, can be used or abused—the approach, however initiated and supported by Grace, is something we must do. Creatures are made in their varying ways images of God without their own collaboration or even consent. It is not so that they become sons of God. And the likeness they receive by sonship is not that of images or portraits. It is in one way more than likeness, for it is union or unity with God in will; but this is consistent with all the differences we have been considering. Hence, as a better writer has said, our imitation of God in this life—that is, our willed imitation as distinct from any of the likenesses which He has impressed upon our natures or states—must be an imitation of God incarnate: our model is the Jesus, not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and privacy, the interruptions. For this, so strangely unlike anything we can attribute to the Divine life in itself, is apparently not only like, but is, the Divine life operating under human conditions.

I must now explain why I have found this distinction necessary to any treatment of our loves. St. John’s saying that God is love has long been balanced in my mind against the remark of a modern author (M. Denis de Rougemont) that “love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god”; which of course can be re-statead in the form "begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god.” This balance seems to me an indispensable safeguard. If we ignore it the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God.

I suppose that everyone who has thought about the matter will see what M. de Rougemont meant. Every human love, at its height, has a tendency to claim for itself a divine authority. Its voice tends to sound as if it were the will of God Himself. It tells us not to count the cost, it demands of us a total commitment, it attempts to over-ride all other claims and insinuates that any action which is sincerely done “for love’s sake” is thereby lawful and even meritorious. That erotic love and love of one’s country may thus attempt to “become gods” is generally recognised. But family affection may do the same. So, in a different way, may friendship. I shall not here elaborate the point, for it will meet us again and again in later chapters.

Now it must be noticed that the natural loves make this blasphemous claim not when they are in their worst, but when they are in their best, natural condition; when they are what our grandfathers called “pure” or “noble.” This is especially obvious in the erotic sphere. A faithful and genuinely self-sacrificing passion will speak to us with what seems the voice of God. Merely animal or frivolous lust will not. It will corrupt its addict in a dozen ways, but not in that way; a man may act upon such feelings but he cannot revere them any more than a man who scratches reveres the itch. A silly woman’s temporary indulgence, which is really self-indulgence, to a spoiled child—her living doll while the fit lasts—is much less likely to “become a god” than the deep, narrow devotion of a woman who (quite really) “lives for her son.” And I am inclined to think that the sort of love for a man’s country which is worked up by beer and brass bands will not lead him to do much harm (or much good) for her sake. It will probably be fully discharged by ordering another drink and joining in the chorus.

And this of course is what we ought to expect. Our loves do not make their claim to divinity until the claim becomes plausible. It does not become plausible until there is in them a real resemblance to God, to Love Himself. Let us here make no mistake. Our Gift-loves are really God-like; and among our Gift-loves those are most God-like which are most boundless and unwearied in giving. All the things the poets say about them are true. Their joy, their energy, their patience, their readiness to forgive, their desire for the good of the beloved—all this is a real and all but adorable image of the Divine life. In its presence we are right to thank God “who has given such power to men.” We may say, quite truly and in an intelligible sense, that those who love greatly are “near” to God. But of course it is “nearness by likeness.” It will not of itself produce “nearness of approach.” The likeness has been given us. It has no necessary connection with that slow and painful approach which must be our own (though by no means our unaided) task. Meanwhile, however, the likeness is a splendour. That is why we may mistake Like for Same. We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance which we owe only to God. Then they become gods: then they become demons. Then they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves. For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred.

Our Need-loves may be greedy and exacting but they do not set up to be gods. They are not near enough (by likeness) to God to attempt that.

It follows from what has been said that we must join neither the idolaters nor the “debunkers” of human love. Idolatry both of erotic love and of “the domestic affections” was the great error of nineteenth-century literature. Browning, Kingsley, and Patmore sometimes talk as if they thought that falling in love was the same thing as sanctification; the novelists habitually oppose to “the World” not the Kingdom of Heaven but the home. We live in the reaction against this. The debunkers stigmatise as slush and sentimentality a very great deal of what their fathers said in praise of love. They are always pulling up and exposing the grubby roots of our natural loves. But I take it we must listen neither “to the over-wise nor to the over-foolish giant.” The highest does not stand without the lowest. A plant must have roots below as well as sunlight above and roots must be grubby. Much of the grubbiness is clean dirt if only you will leave it in the garden and not keep on sprinkling it over the library table. The human loves can be glorious images of Divine love. No less than that: but also no more—proximities of likeness which in one instance may help, and in another may hinder, proximity of approach. Sometimes perhaps they have not very much to do with it either way.

Vicariousness

It’s Got a Wonderful 

Defence Mechanism —

You Don’t Dare Kill it.

"....and Beauty is just absolutely 

Terrifying to People -- because 

Beauty highlights What's Ugly."

“The Universe is quite a shockingly selective, undemocratic place out of apparently infinite space, a relatively tiny proportion occupied by matter of any kind. 

Of the stars perhaps only one has planets : of the planets only one is at all likely to sustain organic life. 

Of the animals only one species is rational. 

Selection as seen in Nature, and the appalling waste which it involves, appears a horrible and an unjust thing by Human Standards. 

But the selectiveness in The Christian Story is not quite like that. The People who are selected are, in a sense, unfairly selected for a Supreme Honour; but it is also a Supreme Burden. 

The People of Israel come to realise that it is their woes which are Saving The World. 

Even in Human Society, though, one sees how this inequality furnishes an opportunity for every kind of Tyranny and Servility. Yet, on the other hand, one also sees that it furnishes an opportunity for some of the very best things we can think of - Humility, and Kindness, and the immense pleasures of Admiration. 

(I cannot conceive how one would get through the boredom of a world in which you never met anyone more Clever, or more Beautiful, or Stronger than yourself. The very crowds who go after the football celebrities and film-stars know better than to desire that kind of Equality!) 

What The Story of The Incarnation seems to be doing is to flash a new light on A Principle in Nature, and to show for the first time that this Principle of Inequality in Nature is neither Good nor Bad. 

It is a common theme running through both The Goodness and Badness of The Natural World, and I begin to see how it can Survive as A Supreme Beauty in a redeemed universe. 

And with that I have unconsciously passed over to The Third Point. I have said that the selectiveness was not unfair in the way in which we first suspect, because those selected for The Great Honour are also selected for The Great Suffering, and Their Suffering heals Others. 

In the Incarnation we get, of course, this idea of Vicariousness of one person profiting by the earning of another person. In its highest form that is the very centre of Christianity. 

And we also find this same Vicariousness to be a characteristic, or, as the musician would put it, a leit-motif of Nature. 

It is a Law of The Natural Universe that No Being can Exist on its Own Resources. 

Everyone, everything, is hopelessly indebted to Everyone and Everything Else. 

In The Universe, as we now see it, this is the source of many of the greatest horrors: all the horrors of carnivorousness, and the worse horrors of the parasites, those horrible animals that live under the skin of other animals, and so on. 

And yet, suddenly seeing it in the light of The Christian Story, one realizes that vicariousness is not in itself bad; that all these animals, and insects, and horrors are merely that principle of vicariousness twisted in one way. 

For when you think it out, nearly Everything GOOD in Nature also comes from Vicariousness. After all, The Child, both before and after birth, Lives on its Mother, just as The Parasite lives on its Host, the one being A Horror, the other being The Source of almost every natural Goodness in The World. It all depends upon what you do with this principle. 

So that I find in that Third Way also, that what is implied by The Incarnation just fits in exactly with what I have seen in Nature, and (this is the important point) each time it gives it a new twist. 

 

If I accept this supposed missing chapter, The Incarnation, I find it begins to illuminate the whole of the rest of the manuscript. It lights up Nature's pattern of Death and Rebirth; and, secondly, Her Selectiveness; and, thirdly, Her vicariousness. 

 

Now I notice a very odd point. 

 

All other religions in The World, as far as I know them, are either Nature Religions, or anti-Nature Religions. 

 

The Nature Religions are those of the old, simple pagan sort that you know about. You actually got drunk in The Temple of Bacchus. You actually committed fornication in The Temple of Aphrodite. 

 

The more modern form of nature religion would be the religion started, in a sense, by Bergson' (but he repented, and died Christian), and carried on in a more popular form by Mr Bernard Shaw. 

 

The AntiNature Religions are those like Hinduism and Stoicism, where Men say,  

 

`I will starve my flesh. I care not whether I live or die.' 

 

All Natural Things are to be set aside: The aim is Nirvana, apathy, negative spirituality. The nature religions simply affirm my natural desires. The anti-natural religions simply contradict them. 

 

The Nature Religions simply give a new sanction to what I already always thought about The Universe in my moments of rude health and cheerful brutality. 

 

The antinature religions merely repeat what I always thought about it in my moods of lassitude, or delicacy, or compassion.

 

But here is something quite different. 

Here is something telling me - well, what? 

 

Telling me that I must never, like The Stoics, 

say that 'Death Does not Matter. 

 

Nothing is Less Christian than that. 

Death which made Life Himself shed tears at The Grave of Lazarus, and shed Tears of Blood in Gethsemane.", This is an appalling horror; a stinking indignity. 

 

(You remember Thomas Browne's splendid remark: `I am not so much afraid of Death, as ashamed of it.')  

 

And yet, somehow or other, infinitely Good. Christianity does not simply affirm or simply deny The Horror of Death; it tells me something quite new about it. 

Again, it does not, like Nietzsche, simply confirm My Desire to Be Stronger, or Cleverer than Other People. 

 

On The Other Hand, it does not allow me to say, 

`Oh, Lord, won't there be A Day when Everyone will be as Good as Everyone Else?' 

In the same way, about vicariousness. 

 

It will not, in any way, allow me to be An Exploiter, 

to Act as A Parasite on Other People; 

Yet it Will Not allow Me 

any Dream of 

Living on My Own. 

 

It will Teach Me to Accept with Glad Humility 

the enormous Sacrifice that 

Others Make for Me, 

as well as to Make Sacrifices for others.

That is why I think this Grand Miracle is The Missing Chapter in this novel, the chapter on which the whole plot turns; that is why I believe that God really has dived down into The Bottom of Creation, and has come up bringing the whole Redeemed Nature on His Shoulder. The Miracles that have already happened are, of course, as Scripture so often says, the first fruits of that cosmic summer which is presently coming on.

Christ Has Risen, and so We Shall Rise. 

 

St Peter for a few seconds Walked on The Waters and the day will come 

when there will be 

a re-made universe, infinitely obedient to  

The Will of Glorified and Obedient Men, 

when we can do All Things, 

when we shall be Those Gods that 

We are Described as Being in Scripture. 

 

To Be Sure, it feels Wintry enough still : 

but often in the very early Spring it feels like that. 

 

Two thousand years are only a day or two by this scale. 

 

A man really ought to say, `The Resurrection happened two thousand years ago' in the same spirit in which he says, `I saw a crocus yesterday.' 

Be cause we know What is Coming behind The Crocus. 

The Spring cames slowly down this way; but the great thing is that The Corner has been turned. 

 

There is, of course, this difference, that in the natural Spring, The Crocus cannot choose whether it will respond or not. We can. 

 

We have The Power either of withstanding the spring, and sinking back into the cosmic winter, or of going on into those `high mid-summer pomps' in which Our Leader, The Son of Man, already dwells, and to which He is calling Us. It remains with us to follow or not, to die in this winter, or to go on into that spring and that summer.

MOSET: 

What do we know so far? 


EMH: 

The lifeform has taken control of her body 

at the autonomic level, 

drawing proteins from her tissues, 

white blood cells from her arteries. 


MOSET: 

Which can be interpreted in several ways. 


EMH: 

A form of attack? 


MOSET: 

I find it odd that a species would evolve an attack mechanism that would leave it so vulnerable. 

Why not do it's damage and retreat? 


EMH: 

A parasite, perhaps? 


MOSET: 

Yes, I think so, but not any ordinary variety. 

It's unlikely it could sustain itself like this over the long term. 


EMH: 

Its own systems are damaged. 

It's doing this as a stopgap measure, to keep itself alive. 


MOSET: 

So the patient's heart, lungs, kidneys, 

they're all augmenting the alien's damaged system. 


EMH: 

It's using B'Elanna 

as a life preserver. 


MOSET: 

But if it needs her to Survive, 

it's not about to let go without a fight.

 


EMH: 

I'd like to think that's a fight 

you and I can win. 

MOYERS: Why “A Gathering of Men?” I mean, that’s really rare, isn’t it, to have a workshop for men only?

BLY: Maybe 20 years ago it would have been rare, but lately the men in various parts of the country have begun to gather. I think that it isn’t a reaction to the women’s movement, really. I think the grief that leads to the men’s movement began maybe 140 years ago, when the Industrial Revolution began, which sends the father out of the house to work.

MOYERS: What impact did that have?

BLY: Well, we receive something from our father by standing close to him.

MOYERS: Physically.

BLY: When we stand physically close to our father, something moves over that can’t be described in material terms, that gives the son a certain confidence, an awareness, a knowledge of what it is to be male, what a man is. And in the ancient times you were always with your father; he taught you how to do things, he taught you how to farm, he taught you whatever it is that he did. You learned from him. But you had this sense of being of receiving a food from him.

MOYERS: Food.

BLY: A Food. From Your Father’s body. Now, when the father went out of the house in the Industrial Revolution, that food ended, and I think the average American father now spends ten minutes a day with a son — I think that’s what The Minneapolis Tribune had — and half of that time is spent in, “Clean up your room!” You know, that’s a favorite phrase of mine, I know it well.

So the Industrial Revolution did not harm the mother and daughter relationship as much as it did the father and son, because the mother and daughter still stand close to each other and have stood close to each other. Maybe that’ll change now when the mother is being sent out to work also, but the daughters then receive some knowledge of what it is to be a woman, or if you prefer to call it the women’s the female mode of feeling. They receive knowledge of the female mode of feeling. And the mother gets that from her grandmother, who got it from her great grandmother, who gets it from her great grandmother, it goes all the way down.

After the Industrial Revolution, the male does not receive any knowledge from His Father of what the male mode of feeling is, and the old male initiators that used to work are not working anymore.

MOYERS: What do you mean, male initiators?

BLY: Well, the you know, in the traditional times, you were not initiated by your father, because there’s too much tension between you and your father. You are initiated by older, unrelated males, is the word that’s used, older unrelated men. They may be friends of your father. They could even be uncles or grandfathers. But they are the ones who used to do it. Then they disappear. Then it falls on the father to do. Then the father is off at the office. You see the picture?

MOYERS: Yeah. In fact, in some of the traditional cultures, a night arrives, and a group of men show up at a boy’s house, and they take him away from the home and they don’t bring him back, then, for several days. And then when he comes back, he has ashes on his face.

BLY: Yeah. In New Guinea, where they still do it today, the men come in with spears to get the boys. The boys know nothing about the men’s world. They live with their mother completely. They say, you know, “Mama, Mama, save us from these men that are coming here.” Now, all over New Guinea, the women accept and the men accept one thing. A boy cannot be made into a man without the active intervention of the older men.

Now, when they all accept that, then the women’s job is to be participants in this drama. So the men come and take the boys away, and the boys are saying, “Save me, Mommy,” you know. Then they go across, and the men have built a tent on this island they have a built a house for the boys’ initiation hut. Then they take them across the bridge, and three or four of the women, whose boys these are, get their spears and meet them on the bridge. And the old men have their spears. And the boys are saying, “Save me, Mama, save me, these are horrible men, they’re taking me away,” you know, and they fight and everything. And then the women are driven back. Then the women all go back and have coffee and say, “How’d I do? How’d I look?”

So that wonderful participation in it, the women are not doing the initiating, they’re participating, and then, as you said, then he’ll stay with the men for a year, maybe. Then they will explain to him something has to die to be born, and what will have to die is the boy. This is what isn’t happening to the men in this culture.