They DARE to TAMPER with The Forces of CREATION!?

They DARE to Tamper — with 

The Forces of CREATION...!?

OLD GRANDFATHER : 

YES!! They DARE..!!

And WE have got to Dare to STOP Them!!

“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.

The Personal Justice Warrior

Personal Justice : 

A Warriorship Ethic

And Finally, Rule # 9: 

Nobody’s Perfect. 

People are going to tell you, 

"You're perfect just the way you are." 

You are Not! 

You are imperfect. 

You always will be.

 But, There is a Powerful Force 

that designed you that way. 

And if you're willing to accept that, 

You Will Have GRACE.

 

And Grace is a gift.

And like The Freedom 

that we enjoy in This Country,

That Grace was paid for with 

Somebody Else's blood. 

Do not forget it. 

Don't take it for granted.

God bless you.

Please get home safely.

Thank you.

WHY I AM NOT A PACIFIST 

(1940) 

The question is whether to serve in the wars at the command of the civil society to which we belong is a wicked action, or an action morally indifferent or an action morally obligatory. 

In asking how to decide this question, we are raising a much more general question: how do we decide what is good or evil? 

The usual answer is that we decide by conscience. 

But probably no one thinks now of conscience as a separate faculty, like one of the senses. Indeed, it cannot be so thought of. 

For an autonomous faculty like a sense cannot be argued with; you cannot argue a man into seeing green if he sees blue. 

But the conscience can be altered by argument; and if you did not think so, you would not have asked me to come and argue with you about the morality of obeying the civil law when it tells us to serve in the wars. 

Conscience, then, means the whole man engaged in a particular subject matter. 

But even in this sense conscience still has two meanings. 

It can mean (a) the pressure a man feels upon his will to do what he thinks is right; (b) his judgement as to what the content of right and wrong are. 

In sense (a) conscience is always to be followed. 

It is the sovereign of the universe, which ‘if it had power as it has right, would absolutely Rule The World’. 

It is not to be argued with, but obeyed, and even to question it is to incur guilt. 

But in sense (b) it is a very different matter. 

People may be mistaken about wrong and right; most people in some degree are mistaken. 

By what means are mistakes in this field to be corrected? 

The most useful analogy here is that of Reason – by which I do not mean some separate faculty but, once more, The Whole Man judging, only judging this time not about Good and Evil, but about Truth and Falsehood. 

Now any concrete train of reasoning involves three elements :

Firstly, there is the reception of facts to reason about. 

These facts are received either from Our Own Senses, or from The Report of Other Minds; that is, either experience or authority supplies us with our material. 

But each man’s experience is so limited that the second source is the more usual; of every hundred Facts upon which to Reason, ninety-nine depend on Authority. 

Secondly, there is the direct, simple act of the mind perceiving Self-Evident Truth, as when we see that if A and B both equal C, then they equal each other. 

This act I call Intuition. 

Thirdly, there is an art or skill of arranging the facts so as to yield a series of such intuitions which linked together produce a proof of the truth or falsehood of the proposition we are considering. 

Thus in a geometrical proof each step is Seen by Intuition, and to fail to see it is to be not a bad geometrician but An Idiot. 

The skill comes in arranging the material into a series of intuitable ‘steps’. 

Failure to do this does not mean Idiocy, but only lack of Ingenuity or Invention. 

Failure to follow it need not mean Idiocy, but either Inattention or Defect of Memory which forbids us to hold all the intuitions together. 

Now all Correction of Errors in Reasoning is really correction of the first or the third element. 

The Second, the Intuitional element, cannot be corrected if it is Wrong, nor supplied if it is lacking. 

You can give The Man New Facts. 

You can Invent a Simpler Proof, that is, a simple concatenation of intuitable Truths. 

But when you come to an Absolute Inability to See any one of the self-evident steps out of which the proof is built, then you can do nothing. 

No doubt this Absolute Inability is much rarer than we suppose. 

Every Teacher knows that people are constantly protesting that they ‘can’t see’ some self-evident inference, but the supposed inability is usually a Refusal to See, resulting either from some passion which wants not to See The Truth in Question or else from Sloth which Does Not Want to Think at All. 

But when the inability is real, argument is at an end. 

You cannot produce rational intuition by argument, because argument depends upon rational intuition. 

Proof rests upon The Unprovable which has to be just ‘Seen’. 

Hence faulty intuition is incorrigible. 

It does not follow that it cannot be trained by practice in attention and in the mortification of disturbing passions, or corrupted by the opposite habits. 

But it is not amenable to correction by argument. Before leaving the subject of Reason, I must point out that authority not only combines with experience to produce the raw material, the ‘facts’, but also has to be frequently used instead of reasoning itself as a method of getting conclusions. 

For example, few of us have followed the reasoning on which even 10 per cent of the truths we believe are based. 

We accept them on authority from the experts and are wise to do so, for though we are thereby sometimes deceived, yet we should have to live like savages if we did not. 

Now all three elements are found also in conscience. 

The facts as before, come from experience and authority. I do not mean ‘moral facts’ but those facts about actions without holding which we could not raise moral questions at all – for we should not even be discussing Pacifism if we did not know what war and killing meant, nor Chastity, if we had not yet learned what schoolmasters used to call ‘the facts of life’. 

Secondly, there are the pure intuitions of utterly simple good and evil as such. 

Third, there is the process of argument by which you arrange the intuitions so as to convince a man that a particular act is wrong or right. 

And finally, there is authority as a substitute for argument, telling a man of some wrong or right which he would not otherwise have discovered, and rightly accepted if the man has good reason to believe the authority wiser and better than himself. 

The main difference between Reason and Conscience is an alarming one. 

It is thus: that while the unarguable intuitions on which all depend are liable to be corrupted by passion when we are considering truth and falsehood, they are much more liable, they are almost certain to be corrupted when we are considering good and evil. 

For then we are concerned with some action to be here and now done or left undone by ourselves. 

And we should not be considering that action at all unless we had some wish either to do or not to do it, so that in this sphere we are bribed from the very beginning. 

Hence the value of Authority in checking, or even superseding, our own activity is much greater in this sphere than in that of Reason. 

Hence, too, human beings must be trained in obedience to the moral intuitions almost before they have them, and years before they are rational enough to discuss them, or they will be corrupted before the time for discussion arrives.

BALDER

“As Isaac aged, He became blind and was uncertain when He would die, so He decided to bestow Esau’s birthright upon him. 

He requested that Esau go out to the fields with his weapons (quiver and bow) to kill some venison. 

Isaac then requested that Esau make “savory meat” for Him out of the venison, according to the way He enjoyed it the most, so that He could eat it and bless Esau.

Rebecca overheard this conversation. 

It is suggested that She realised prophetically that Isaac’s blessings would go to Jacob, since She was told before the twins’ birth that The Older Son would serve The Younger. 

Rebecca blessed Jacob and she quickly ordered Jacob to bring her two kid goats from their flock so that he could take Esau’s place in serving Isaac and receiving his blessing. 

Jacob protested that His Father would recognise their deception since Esau was HAIRY and he himself was SMOOTH-SKINNED. 

He feared His Father would curse him as soon as he felt him, but Rebecca offered to take the curse Herself, then insisted that Jacob obey ONLY Her.

Jacob did as His Mother instructed and, when he returned with the kids, Rebekah made the savory meat that Isaac loved. Before she sent Jacob to His Father, she dressed him in Esau’s garments and laid goatskins on his arms and neck to simulate hairy skin.”

“I heard a voice that cried,

Balder the beautiful

Is dead, is dead 

- I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it. 

The reader who finds these three episodes of no interest need read this book no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else. 

For those who are still disposed to proceed I will only underline the quality common to the three experiences; it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. 

I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. 

Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. 

Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. 

But then it is a kind we want. 

I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. 

But then Joy is never in Our Power and Pleasure often is. 

I cannot be absolutely sure whether the things I have just been speaking of happened before or after the great loss which befell our family and to which I must now turn. 

There came a night when I was ill and crying both with headache and toothache and distressed because my mother did not come to me. 

That was because she was ill too; and what was odd was that there were several doctors in her room, and voices, and comings and goings all over the house and doors shutting and opening. It seemed to last for hours. 

And then My Father, in tears, came into my room and began to try to convey to my terrified mind things it had never conceived before. 

It was in fact cancer and followed the usual course; an operation (they operated in the patient’s house in those days), an apparent convalescence, a return of the disease, increasing pain, and death. 

My Father never fully recovered from this loss. 

Children suffer not (I think) less than their elders, but differently. 

For us boys the real bereavement had happened before our mother died. 

We lost her gradually as she was gradually withdrawn from our life into the hands of nurses and delirium and morphia, and as our whole existence changed into something alien and menacing, as the house became full of strange smells and midnight noises and sinister whispered conversations. 

This had two further results, one very evil and one very good. 

It divided us from our father as well as our mother. They say that a shared sorrow draws people closer together; I can hardly believe that it often has that effect when those who share it are of widely different ages. 

If I may trust to my own experience, the sight of adult misery and adult terror has an effect on children which is merely paralysing and alienating. Perhaps it was our fault. Perhaps if we had been better children we might have lightened our father’s sufferings at this time. 

We certainly did not. 

His nerves had never been of the steadiest and his emotions had always been uncontrolled. 

Under the pressure of anxiety his temper became incalculable; he spoke wildly and acted unjustly. 

Thus by a peculiar cruelty of fate, during those months the unfortunate man, had he but known it, was really losing his sons as well as his wife. 

We were coming, my brother and I, to rely more and more exclusively on each other for all that made life bearable; to have confidence only in each other. 

I expect that we (or at any rate I) were already learning to lie to him. 

Everything that had made the house a home had failed us; everything except one another. 

We drew daily closer together (that was the good result) - two frightened urchins huddled for warmth in a bleak world. 

Grief in childhood is complicated with many other miseries. 

I was taken into the bedroom where my mother lay dead; as they said, ‘to see her’, in reality, as I at once knew, ‘to see it’. 

There was nothing that a grown-up would call disfigurement - except for that total disfigurement which is death itself. 

Grief was overwhelmed in terror. 

To this day I do not know what they mean when they call dead bodies beautiful. 

The ugliest man alive is an angel of beauty compared with the loveliest of the dead. 

Against all the subsequent paraphernalia of coffin, flowers, hearse, and funeral I reacted with horror. 

I even lectured one of my aunts on the absurdity of mourning clothes in a style which would have seemed to most adults both heartless and precocious; but this was our dear Aunt Annie, my maternal uncle’s Canadian wife, a woman almost as sensible and sunny as my mother herself. 

To my hatred for what I already felt to be all the fuss and flummery of the funeral I may perhaps trace something in me which I now recognise as a defect but which I have never fully overcome - a distaste for all that is public, all that belongs to The Collective; a boorish inaptitude for formality. 

My mother’s death was the occasion of what some (but not I) might regard as my first religious experience. 

When her case was pronounced hopeless I remembered what I had been taught; that prayers offered in faith would be granted. I accordingly set myself to produce by willpower a firm belief that my prayers for her recovery would be successful; and, as I thought, I achieved it. 

When nevertheless she died I shifted my ground and worked myself into a belief that there was to be a miracle. 

The interesting thing is that my disappointment produced no results beyond itself. 

The thing hadn’t worked, but I was used to things not working, and I thought no more about it. 

I think the truth is that the belief into which I had hypnotised myself was itself too irreligious for its failure to cause any religious revolution. 

I had approached God, or my idea of God, without love, without awe, even without fear. 

He was, in my mental picture of this miracle, to appear neither as Saviour nor as Judge, but merely as a magician; and when He had done what was required of Him I supposed He would simply - well, go away. 

It never crossed my mind that the tremendous contact which I solicited should have any consequences beyond restoring the status quo. I imagine that a ‘faith’ of this kind is often generated in children and that its disappointment is of no religious importance; just as the things believed in, if they could happen and be only as the child pictures them, would be of no religious importance either. With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.

EQUALITY

Equality

"Equality" is reprinted from The Spectator, vol. CLXXI (27 August 1943), p. 192

I am a democrat (1) because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they're not true. Whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure. I find that they're not true without looking further than myself. I don't deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people — all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumors. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

This introduces a view of equality rather different from that in which we have been trained. I do not think that equality is one of those things (like wisdom or happiness) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. I think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill, or clothes which are good because we are no longer innocent. I don't think the old authority in kings, priests, husbands, or fathers, and the old obedience in subjects, laymen, wives, and sons, was in itself a degrading or evil thing at all. I think it was intrinsically as good and beautiful as the nakedness of Adam and Eve. It was rightly taken away because men became bad and abused it. To attempt to restore it now would be the same error as that of the Nudists. Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.

But medicine is not good. There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality. It is a dim recognition of this fact which makes much of our political propaganda sound so thin. We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life. That is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology. The tempter always works on some real weakness in our own system of values -- offers food to some need which we have starved.

When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget, but as an ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. 

That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked. 

The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other - the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow - is a prosaic barbarian. 

But it would be wicked folly to restore these old inequalities on the legal or external plane. Their proper place is elsewhere.

We must wear clothes since the Fall. Yes, but inside, under what Milton called "these troublesome disguises" (2). We want the naked body, that is, the real body, to be alive. We want it, on proper occasions, to appear -- in the marriage-chamber, in the public privacy of a men's bathing-place, and (of course) when any medical or other emergency demands. In the same way, under the necessary outer covering of legal equality, the whole hierarchical dance and harmony of our deep and joyously accepted spiritual inequalities should be alive. It is there, of course, in our life as Christians -- there, as laymen, we can obey – all the more because the priest has no authority over us on the political level. It is there in our relation to parents and teachers – all the more because it is now a willed and wholly spiritual reverence. It should be there also in marriage.

This last point needs a little plain speaking. Men have so horribly abused their power over women in the past that to wives, of all people, equality is in danger of appearing as an ideal. 

But Mrs. Naomi Mitchison has laid her finger on the real point. 

Have as much equality as you please – the more the better – in our marriage laws, but at some level consent to inequality, nay, delight in inequality, is an erotic necessity. 

Mrs. Mitchison speaks of women so fostered on a defiant idea of equality that the mere sensation of the male embrace rouses an undercurrent of resentment. Marriages are thus shipwrecked (3). This is the tragi-comedy of the modem woman -- taught by Freud to consider the act of love the most important thing in life, and then inhibited by feminism from that internal surrender which alone can make it a complete emotional success. Merely for the sake of her own erotic pleasure, to go no further, some degree of obedience and humility seems to be (normally) necessary on the woman's part.

The error here has been to assimilate all forms of affection to that special form we call friendship. It indeed does imply equality. But it is quite different from the various loves within the same household. Friends are not primarily absorbed in each other. It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up – painting, sailing ships, praying, philosophizing, fighting shoulder to shoulder. Friends look in the same direction. Lovers look at each other -- that is, in opposite directions. To transfer bodily all that belongs to one relationship into the other is blundering.

We Britons should rejoice that we have contrived to reach much legal democracy (we still need more of the economic) without losing our ceremonial Monarchy. For there, right in the midst of our lives, is that which satisfies the craving for inequality, and acts as a permanent reminder that medicine is not food. Hence a man's reaction to Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be "debunked", but watch the faces, mark well the accents of the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot in Eden has been cut -- whom no rumor of the polyphony, the dance, can reach – men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honor a king they honor millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead -- even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served -- deny it food and it will gobble poison.

That is why this whole question is of practical importance. Every intrusion of the spirit that says, "I'm as good as you" into our personal and spiritual life is to be resisted just as jealously as every intrusion of bureaucracy or privilege into our politics. Hierarchy within can alone preserve egalitarianism without. Romantic attacks on democracy will come again. We shall never be safe unless we already understand in our hearts all that the anti-democrats can say, and have provided for it better than they. Human nature will not permanently endure flat equality if it is extended from its proper political field into the more real, more concrete fields within. Let us wear equality; but let us undress every night.

(1) C.S. Lewis lived and wrote in England. Hence, his reference to "being a Democrat" had nothing to do with our (USA) "Democratic Party". 

(2) John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), Book IV, line 740. 18 

(3) Naomi Mitchison, The Home and a Changing Civilization (London, 1934), Chapter I, pp. 49-50.