Because, as a matter of fact, when you start to teach individual self-realisation to the great masses of people, who when all is said and done are only fragmentary beings, incapable of whole individuality, you end by making them all envious, grudging, spiteful creatures. Anyone who is kind to man knows the fragmentariness of most men, and wants to arrange a society of power in which men fall naturally into a collective wholeness, since they cannot have an individual wholeness. In this collective wholeness they will be fulfilled. But if they make efforts at individual fulfilment, they must fail for they are by nature fragmentary. Then, failures, having no wholeness anywhere, they fall into envy and spite. Jesus knew all about it when he said: To them that have shall be given, etc. But he had forgotten to reckon with the mass of the mediocre, whose motto is: We have nothing and therefore nobody shall have anything.
But Jesus gave the ideal for the Christian individual, and deliberately avoided giving an ideal for the State or the nation. When he said, ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s’, he left to Caesar the rule of men’s bodies, willy- nilly: and this threatened terrible danger to a man’s mind and soul. Already by the year a.d. 60 the Christians were an accursed sect; and they were compelled, like all men, to sacrifice, that is to give worship to the living Caesar. In giving Caesar the power over men’s bodies, Jesus gave him the power to compel men to make the act of worship to Caesar. Now I doubt if Jesus himself could have performed this act of worship, to a Nero or a Domitian. No doubt he would have preferred death. As did so many early Christian martyrs. So there, at the very beginning was a monstrous dilemma. To be a Christian meant death at the hands of the Roman State; for refusal to submit to the cult of the Emperor and worship the divine man, Caesar, was impossible to a Christian. No wonder, then, that John of Patmos saw the day not far off when every Christian would be martyred. The day would have come, if the imperial cult had been absolutely enforced on the people. And then when every Christian was martyred, what could a Christian expect but a Second Advent, resurrection, and an absolute revenge! There was a condition for the Christian community to be in, sixty years after the death of the Saviour.
Jesus made it inevitable, when he said that the money belonged to Caesar. It was a mistake. Money means bread, and the bread of men belongs to no men. Money means also power, and it is monstrous to give power to the virtual enemy. Caesar was bound, sooner or later, to violate the soul of the Christians. But Jesus saw the individual only, and considered only the individual. He left it to John of Patmos, who was up against the Roman State, to formulate the Christian vision of the Christian State. John did it in the Apocalypse. It entails the destruction of the whole world, and the reign of saints in ultimate bodiless glory. Or it entails the destruction of all earthly power, and the rule of an oligarchy of martyrs (the Millennium).
This destruction of all earthly power we are now moving towards. The oligarchy of martyrs began with Lenin, and apparently others also are martyrs. Strange, strange people they are, the martyrs, with weird, cold morality. When every country has its martyr-ruler, either like Lenin or like those, what a strange, unthinkable world it will be! But it is coming: the Apocalypse is still a book to conjure with.
A few vastly important points have been missed by Christian doctrine and Christian thought. Christian fantasy alone has grasped them.
1. No man is or can be a pure individual. The mass of men have only the tiniest touch of individuality: if any. The mass of men live and move, think and feel collectively, and have practically no individual emotions, feelings or thoughts at all. They are fragments of the collective or social consciousness. It has always been so. And will always be so.
2. The State, or what we call Society as a collective whole cannot have the psychology of an individual. Also it is a mistake to say that the State is made up of individuals.
It is not. It is made up of a collection of fragmentary beings. And no collective act, even so private an act as voting, is made from the individual self. It is made from the collective self, and has another psychological background, non-individual.
3. The State cannot be Christian. Every State is a Power. It cannot be otherwise. Every State must guard its own boundaries and guard its own prosperity. If it fails to do so, it betrays all its individual citizens.
4. Every citizen is a unit of worldly power. A man may wish to be a pure Christian and a pure individual. But since he must be a member of some political State, or nation, he is forced to be a unit of worldly power.
5. As a citizen, as a collective being, man has his fulfilment in the gratification of his power-sense. If he belongs to one of the so-called ‘ruling nations’, his soul is fulfilled in the sense of his country’s power or strength. If his country mounts up aristocratically to a zenith of splendour and power, in a hierarchy, he will be all the more fulfilled, having his place in the hierarchy. But if his country is powerful and democratic, then he will be obsessed with a perpetual will to assert his power in interfering and preventing other people from doing as they wish, since no man must do more than another man. This is the condition of modern democracies, a condition of perpetual bullying.
In democracy, bullying inevitably takes the place of power. Bullying is the negative form of power. The modern Christian State is a soul-destroying force, for it is made up of fragments which have no organic whole, only a collective whole. In a hierarchy each part is organic and vital, as my finger is an organic and vital part of me. But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness.
6. To have an ideal for the individual which regards only his individual self and ignores his collective self is in the long run fatal. To have a creed of individuality which denies the reality of the hierarchy makes at last for more anarchy. Democratic man lives by cohesion and resistance, the cohesive force of ‘love’ and the resistant force of the individual ‘freedom’. To yield entirely to love would be to be absorbed, which is the death of the individual: for the individual must hold his own, or he ceases to be ‘free’ and individual. So that we see, what our age has proved to its astonishment and dismay, that the individual cannot love. The individual cannot love: let that be an axiom. And the modern man or woman cannot conceive of himself, herself, save as an individual. And the individual in man or woman is bound to kill, at last, the lover in himself or herself. It is not that each man kills the thing he loves, but that each man, by insisting on his own individuality, kills the lover in himself, as the woman kills the lover in herself. The Christian dare not love: for love kills that which is Christian, democratic, and modern, the individual. The individual cannot love. When the individual loves, he ceases to be purely individual. And so he must recover himself, and cease to love. It is one of the most amazing lessons of our day: that the individual, the Christian, the democrat cannot love. Or, when he loves, when she loves, he must take it back, she must take it back.
So much for private or personal love. Then what about that other love, ‘caritas’, loving your neighbour as yourself?
It works out the same. You love your neighbour. Immediately you run the risk of being absorbed by him: you must draw back, you must hold your own. The love becomes resistance. In the end, it is all resistance and no love: which is the history of democracy.
If you are taking the path of individual self-realisation, you had better, like Buddha, go off and be by yourself, and give a thought to nobody. Then you may achieve your Nirvana. Christ’s way of loving your neighbour leads to the hideous anomaly of having to live by sheer resistance to your neighbour, in the end.
The Apocalypse, strange book, makes this clear. It shows us the Christian in his relation to the State; which the gospels and epistles avoid doing. It shows us the Christian in relation to the State, to the world, and to the cosmos. It shows him in mad hostility to all of them, having, in the end, to will the destruction of them all.
It is the dark side of Christianity, of individualism, and of democracy, the side the world at large now shows us. And it is, simply, suicide. Suicide individual and en masse.
If man could will it, it would be cosmic suicide. But the cosmos is not at man’s mercy, and the sun will not perish to please us.
We do not want to perish, either. We have to give up a false position. Let us give up our false position as Christians, as individuals, as democrats. Let us find some conception of ourselves that will allow us to be peaceful and happy, instead of tormented and unhappy.
The Apocalypse shows us what we are resisting, unnaturally. We are unnaturally resisting our connection with the cosmos, with the world, with mankind, with the nation, with the family. All these connections are, in the Apocalypse, anathema, and they are anathema to us. We cannot bear connection. That is our malady. We must break away, and be isolate. We call that being free, being individual. Beyond a certain point, which we have reached, it is suicide. Perhaps we have chosen suicide. Well and good. The Apocalypse too chose suicide, with subsequent self-glorification.
But the Apocalypse shows, by its very resistance, the things that the human heart secretly yearns after. By the very frenzy with which the Apocalypse destroys the sun and the stars, the world, and all kings and all rulers, all scarlet and purple and cinnamon, all harlots, finally all men altogether who are not ‘sealed’, we can see how deeply the apocalyptists are yearning for the sun and the stars and the earth and the waters of the earth, for nobility and lordship and might, and scarlet and gold splendour, for passionate love, and a proper unison with men, apart from this sealing business. What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his ‘soul’. Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.
So that my individualism is really an illusion. I am a part of the great whole, and I can never escape. But I can deny my connections, break them, and become a fragment. Then I am wretched.
What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.