Of War and Hope
by
Robin Kornman
I'm writing this in the Asian Reading Room at the Library
of Congress. Around me, here in one of the world's great repositories of knowledge,
the library staff are rushing in their quiet way to list which of their treasures
are irreplaceable. They must remove these to a bomb-proof shelter. These days,
even the most cloistered scholar must look war and political evil in the eye.
A
problem that has been abstract for this generation, but terribly real in the last
century, is now sadly real again. Americans are face to face with the problem
of human nature and evil. The evil seems to wear two masks: it has appeared in
the external form of terrorism, and we fear its appearance in the internal form
of intolerance and repression.
Now is the time to take instruction from a group
of courageous writers and thinkers who were forced to confront the question of
human evil on a scale we can only now begin even to imagine. These are the modernists
who saw the vast horror of two world wars, who faced the engulfing evil of fascism,
and nevertheless, against all evidence, affirmed the existence of a transcendent
human nature and inherent meaningfulness. In the face of worldwide political evil,
they taught of ultimate good.
For them the world fell suddenly into two camps:
the civilized Allies led by the British Empire and the United States, and the
fascist Axis powers, who seemed capable of every sort of inhumanity. Even before
they knew the outcome, the conflict itself had sapped the faith of artists and
authors across the world. For both the Germans and the Japanese had been symbols
of the power of civilization to perfect the virtues of the human spirit. How could
thoughtful, educated people-their souls enriched with religion, their minds civilized
by music, philosophy, and art-be capable of such evil?
The answer for most
post-war thinkers was that good was not inherent and wisdom was not natural. It
was a kind of embittered relativism, seasoned strangely with bursts of national
or ethnic patriotism: Art must be experimental, for the past can be no guide,
having led to the bloodbaths of World Wars I and II. Philosophy can possess no
wisdom, for the Germans were master philosophers before they embraced fascism.
Religion could offer no shelter, for perfectly serious Christians had been concentration
camp guards.
Thus mainstream thought for the post-war generation of thinkers
and artists alternated between disillusionment and narrow patriotism. Human nature
had turned en masse to political evil. The Allies may have beaten fascism, but
after the "victory" traditional civilization was still in ruins. The
answer for most was the multi-faceted world of experiments in expression that
we call modernism.
Modernist Mystics
But some, having looked into the same
abyss, nevertheless took another direction-a spiritual direction that upheld hope
in human nature and history-and began to teach what Aldous Huxley called "the
perennial philosophy." This is the uncynical belief taught by all Asian philosophy
and some Western mystics that the divine is immanent. Whatever consciousness can
touch is divine by nature, and through spiritual practice can be realized to be
so.
Many of the Western intellectuals who believed this turned to Eastern thought
late in their careers. They may have begun as spokesmen for modernism, but their
ultimate solution to the metaphysical problems of the post-war generation was
the idea that spirituality worked where science, talk and political commitment
had not.
These were the intellectual children of the two world wars, who had
struggled with the fall from grace of traditional Western civilization. European
authors in particular experienced philosophical and historical nightmares hard
to share with Americans, seemingly protected between two deep oceans. Only the
American soldiers themselves had been face to face with the same vast evil, and
it took them generations to express their horror.
The advanced European thinkers
of the fifties saw the World Wars as a refutation of 19th-century European culture.
The supposedly civilized great powers of western Europe had fallen upon each other
in two unexampled feasts of bloodshed. Germany, which was supposed to be the "land
of poets and philosophers," had willingly placed a mad criminal in power.
The romantic nationalist and republican philosophies, and the classical philosophies
supposedly inherited from ancient Greece and Rome, had prevented nothing, protected
nothing. Both the hierarchical values of Catholicism and the democratic values
of Protestantism had easily complied with fascism.
T.S. Eliot's famous poem,
"The Wasteland," made its general indictment of Western civilization.
And Yeat's poem, "The Second Coming," became the text every schoolchild
read to learn that the old values had fallen, that now was the time when:
"Things
fall apart, the center does not hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world..."
In
response, most modernists did not provide a new creed, a new system by which one
could live or reconstruct civilization. They simply placed their art at the disposal
of the universal postwar critique: that the old civilization had fallen and that
one did not know how to make life meaningful without the religious and humanistic
values of that vanished world. In this context the authors who could assert a
transcendental truth showed a special breed of courage.
Viktor Frankl: Mysticism
in a Concentration Camp
Viktor Frankl was one of the most important spokesmen
for a non-materialist approach to moral life. His greatest work does not literally
refer to Asia or meditation practice and yet, by his example, he laid a foundation
for other modernist mystical thinkers. Frankl was a Jewish psychologist who survived
the Nazi death camps and derived from the experience an approach to psychotherapy
based on finding inherent meaning in life. He called his technique "logotherapy."
His most influential work is Man's Search for Meaning, a book one can read quickly,
living within the world he projects, or slowly, as a wisdom book.
In it he
describes analytically, almost scientifically, his life as a prisoner in Auschwitz.
That should have been a situation where nothing had meaning, for the intention
of the guards was to turn humans into animals, to reduce the lives of internees
to a fruitless struggle for individual survival, and then to kill them like rats.
As
Frankl readily admits, it was impossible for any inmate to show ordinary humanity
without dying immediately from a slight disadvantage in the struggle for survival.
Only one in twenty-four survived the experience and this was known perfectly well
by the prisoners. The only way to survive in the death camps was at the expense
of others. If, for example, a certain transport was destined to take a specific
number of prisoners to the gas chambers, the survivor must act accordingly: "With
no hesitation, therefore, he would arrange for another prisoner, another 'number,'
to take his place in the transport.
On the average, only those prisoners
could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all
scruples in their fight for existence.
We who have come back, by the aid
of many lucky chances or miracles
we know; the best of us did not return."
These
terms of existence stripped away whatever of culture and civilization was not
rooted in the core of human experience. Frankl details with an attitude of scientific
exactitude, and without ideology, moralizing or fancy theory, precisely what is
left after this dissolving of boundaries has taken its course. His authority is
unquestionable because in the narrative you see him, a cultured, sophisticated
and sensitive psychotherapist, survive the specific horrors of a universe where
being human is admitted no sacredness.
When Frankl described his personal,
wordless discovery that there is something transcendent in the human condition,
it was the first and most authoritative positive response to T.S. Eliot's complaint
that Western civilization had collapsed because its values were hollow. Frankl
does not attempt to set up a new system of morality or to uphold the old one.
In fact, he is not given to judgement at all. But he gives positive evidence for
the underlying indestructible character of humanity. He argues that there is a
basic nature to humanness, a nature that is other than the instinctual drives
and mechanistic forces enshrined in every modernist theory.
Where Freud proposes
an instinctual subconscious common to animals and humans, Frankl proposes another
mentality that he calls "the spiritual unconscious." This mind is motivated
not by the will to pleasure, as in Freud, or the will to power, as in Adlerian
psychology, but by what Frankl calls "the will to meaning." Frustration
that one's life seems to lack meaning is not, therefore, a psychological disorder
or a sign of ill-health: "Existential frustration is in itself neither pathological
nor pathogenic. A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of
life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. It may well
be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury
his patient's existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs. It is his
task, rather, to pilot the patient through his existential crises of growth and
development."
Frankl's writings after Man's Search for Meaning gradually
reveal the debt he owes to Buddhism and Hinduism, a debt he has in common with
other Existentialist thinkers from Heidegger and Karl Jaspers to the French phenomenologists.
They speak, using Jaspers' beautiful expression from Philosophy I, of the "inaccessible
ground of human awareness." This is Frankl's "spiritual unconscious,"
so different from the Freudian one. He also calls it Der unbewusste Gott, "the
unconscious god."
This is a knowing which is within us, which seeks meaning,
and which cannot be known analytically or as an object, but which underlies existence.
He quotes the Vedas: "That which does the seeing, cannot be seen; that which
does the hearing, cannot be heard; and that which does the thinking, cannot be
thought." Buddhists might call it the dharmakaya or buddhanature, and their
practices, like those of Jaspers and Frankl, seek to know it but do not analyze
it materialistically or take it for a thing.
This search for "being which
underlies being" Frankl tested in the unforgiving laboratory of the Nazi
death camps. Tempered in such a fire, his philosophy rings with authenticity.
Czeslaw
Milosz and Slavic Depression
Czeslaw Milosz, the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize
for literature, is another author who sought to find positive answers in face
of the abyss. Milosz was actually a Polish-speaking Lithuanian who gained his
poetic voice in the period between the two World Wars. His most important book
is The Captive Mind, an analysis of the Polish intelligentsia under communism.
Poland
at the end of the war knew not one moment of freedom. The blood-thirsty Nazi occupiers
were instantly replaced by brutal Soviet invaders. Polish intellectuals were slowly
transformed into Marxist propagandists, their minds captive and gradually enslaved.
There was no hint that there would ever be a change.
And so the natural vision
of a Polish intellectual who lived through the middle of the 20th century was
one of unrelieved political evil: no saving grace from a liberating American army,
no hope that sanity would reign in the political sphere, no grounds for dreaming
that personal life could freely seek the truth, no room for any truth beyond strict
materialism.
Like Frankl, Milosz is convincing because he does not resort to
controversial idealistic generalizations. His vision of the mental enslavement
of Eastern Europe is reported by a series of detailed case studies of Polish poets
who collaborated with dialectical materialism in order to survive the Russian
takeover. In writing this, Milosz alienated himself both from the community of
thinkers still in Eastern Europe and from the eternal Polish emigré community
in Paris. He became a man alone, bereft of an audience for his poetry because
he could only write in Polish; bereft of a community because of his institutionally
embarrassing honesty.
This makes his book, which could be no more than political
reportage, a work of courage and transcendental wisdom, one of the quintessential
writings of the 20th century. It is strange that such a negative piece could be
so uplifting, but his attacks imply a faith in human nature he never specifies
in so many words. His case studies in complicity and capitulation are all poets
he admires, with whom he feels a profound sympathy, and his treatment of them
is sarcastic but sympathetic.
There is a profound humanity of sadness in his
treatment of the "problem of Eastern Europe" that lingers, as a matter
of fact, through all of his work. This special tone, a kind of enlightened tristesse,
is the sign of a person who senses the existence of wisdom and ultimate good but
is too humble to assert it.
In his recently published letters to Thomas Merton,
Milosz is characteristically proud, humble and sad at the same time: "In
fact I love those people against whom I directed my anger much more than I show.
I did not succeed in showing my love and my whole thought
"
Merton,
a Franciscan monk with Zen leanings, shows in his answer to Milosz the book's
positive virtues: "Whatever you may feel about The Captive Mind...it is certainly
a book that had to be written and evidently such a book could not be written unless
it were written with terrible shortcomings. Good will come of the suffering involved
for you and for others.
It is one of the very few books about the writer
and Communism, or about Communism itself, that has any real value as far as I
can see."
Merton characterizes himself and Milosz as free thinkers who
were "in the middle
caught between two millstones
intellectual(s)
caught between tyrannies." This ability of Milosz to speak from the middle,
a place where there is no ideological ground but only honesty, showed a leaning
to a spirituality that seeks the highest, a fact he makes literal only in his
later writings.
Aldous Huxley and the Perennial Philosophy
Aldous Huxley
was the quintessential postwar intellectual. His novels critiqued the fading English
upper class, which had succeeded in defeating Hitler but had failed to provide
leadership towards a new spiritual life after the war.
Huxley became famous
beyond literary circles when he wrote Brave New World, but his really important
work is The Perennial Philosophy, which makes a clear case for the importance
of meditation. In it Huxley reports his discovery of mystical practice as a solution
to the disillusionment of the postwar world. His famous novels had been pure disillusion
leavened with only a tentative note of hope. Now he could report that there was
a specific saving grace still within Western civilization, a philosophy born of
the direct experience of God in contemplative practice. This was the true fount
of philosophy and ethics, the ecstatic experience of the West's few, precious
Neo-Platonic, Sufi, Christian and Kabalistic mystics.
According to Huxley all
of these philosophies agree at the level of practice with Hinduism, Buddhism,
Taoism and Neo-Confucianism. The key idea is that the divine, the absolute, the
ultimate is immanent in the world. Ordinary material things seem to be mere matter,
but at their core they are God or buddhanature or whatever the particular tradition
uses to call the ultimate.
The book is actually a stitching together of hundreds
of quotes from Western and Eastern scriptures and patristic writings. If Huxley
were 30 years old today he would not have written this book, because a mind so
convinced of its point would have studied Tibetan or Sanskrit or Chinese and written
technical spiritual manuals. But this was the point in history where one needed
to prove that mysticism was the answer to the modern dilemma, and so it may be
that nothing will ever quite replace Huxley's superb presentation.
Grey Eminence
Let
us end this article strangely with a book by Aldous Huxley that deserves attention
but is actually out of print: The Grey Eminence, a Study in Religion and Politics.
This is a case study of a Catholic contemplative monk named Francois le Clerc
du Tremblay, known as Father Joseph, who lived in the time of Louis XIII.
Father
Joseph was one of the great Christian contemplatives of his century. His journals
indicate that in his complex spiritual exercises, he actually experienced face-to-face
the presence of God. But Joseph was also highly political and was closely allied
with the Machiavellian leader of the French state, Cardinal Richelieu. Although
a monk, he became the head of the French secret police.
Richelieu's foreign
policy was to oppose the Austro-Hungarian Empire and see if he could destroy its
power, so that France in the coming century could have European hegemony. Father
Joseph, a French patriot, served him brilliantly in this scheme. In the act, although
a monk, he became one of the causes of the continuation of the Thirty Years War,
a complex religious war that pitted Catholicism against a variety of Protestants.
The
Thirty Years War was so devastating that it reduced the German-speaking areas
of Europe to cannibalism. In Huxley's view, the basis for a healthy German state
was destroyed by this war and the seeds of the chaos of the 20th century were
planted exactly at this moment. And one of the causes of the terrible, wasteful
Thirty Years War was Europe's greatest contemplative. It is a problem with which
we are becoming sadly familiar at this very moment: How can such smart people
do such evil things? How can a man genuinely devoted to religion engage in such
systematic harm?
But an interesting aftereffect of this war was something only
Aldous Huxley could have reported on-the effect of this political policy on Father
Joseph's meditation. In the last years of his life the monk reported that he could
for some reason no longer experience the presence of God in his contemplative
practice. Huxley analyzes Joseph's spiritual techniques and concludes that even
a merely political involvement with violence makes it impossible to experience
personal realization. Joseph never killed or tortured anybody himself, he never
personally committed an assassination. But he ordered such things and he assiduously
collected reports from his army of spies on these aggressive acts. The result
was that he polluted his own contemplative practice and died embittered with his
life despite the utter success of his politics.
Robin Kornman, PH.D., is a
professor of comparative literature and a Tibetan Buddhist translator. He has
studied Slavic literature and Eastern European government, and is currently a
Library of Congress fellow in international studies.