Flight to Arras (18 page)

As the inheritor of God, my civilization made charity to be a gift to Man present in the individual.

 

I understand the profound meaning of the humility exacted from the individual. Humility did not cast down the individual, it raised him up. It made clear to him his role as ambassador. As it obliged him to respect the presence of God in others, so it obliged him to respect the presence of God in himself, to make himself the messenger of God or the path taken by God. It forced him to forget himself in order that he might wax and grow; for if the individual exults in his own importance, the path is transformed into a sea.

As the inheritor of God, my civilization preached self-respect, which is to say respect for Man present in oneself.

 

I understand, finally, why the love of God created men responsible for one another and gave them hope as a virtue. Since it made of each of them the ambassador of the same God, in the hands of each rested the salvation of all. No man had the right to despair, since each was the messenger of a thing greater than himself. Despair was the rejection of God within oneself. The duty of hope was translatable thus: “And dost thou think thyself important? But thy despair is self-conceit!”

 

As the inheritor of God, my civilization made each responsible for all, and all responsible for each. The individual was to sacrifice himself in order that by his sacrifice the community be saved; but this was no matter of idiotic arithmetic. It was a matter of the respect for Man present in the individual. What made my civilization grand was that a hundred miners were called upon to risk their lives in the rescue of a single miner entombed. And what they rescued in rescuing that miner was Man.

 

I understand by this bright light the meaning of liberty. It is liberty to grow as the tree grows in the field of energy of its seed. It is the climate permitting the ascension of Man. It is like a favorable wind. Only by the grace of the wind is the bark free on the waters.

A man built in this wise disposes of the power of the tree. What space may his roots not cover! What human pulp may he not absorb to grow and blossom in the sun!

 

But I had ruined everything. I had dissipated the inheritance. I had allowed the notion of Man to rot.

And yet my civilization had expended a good share of its genius and its energy to preserve the cult of a Prince revealed in the existence of individual men, and the high quality of human relations established by that cult. All the efforts of Humanism tended towards this end in the age of the Renaissance and after. Humanism assigned to itself the exclusive mission of brightening and perpetuating the ideal of the primacy of Man over the individual. What Humanism preached was Man.

But as soon as we seek to speak of Man, our language displays itself insufficient. Man is not the same as men. We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones. We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men. Humanism strove in a direction blocked in advance when it sought to seize the notion of Man in terms of logic and ethics, and by these terms communicate that notion to the human consciousness. Unity of being is not communicable in words. If I knew men to whom the notion of the love of country or of home was strange, and I sought to teach them the meaning of these words, I could not summon a single argument that would waken the sense of country or home in them. I may, if I like, speak of a farm by referring to its fields, its streams, its pastures, its cattle. Each of these by itself, and all of them together, contribute to the existence of the farm. Yet in that farm there must be something which escapes material analysis, since there are farmers who are ready to ruin themselves for their farms. And it is that “something else” which is the essence of the farm and enhances the particles of which the farm is composed. The cattle, by that something else, become the cattle of a farm, the meadows the meadows of a farm, the fields the fields of a farm.

Thus man becomes the man of a country, of a group, of a craft, of a civilization, of a religion. But if we are to clothe ourselves in these higher beings we must begin by creating them within ourselves. The being of which we claim to form part is created within us not by words but only by acts. A being is not subject to the empire of language, but only to the empire of acts. Our Humanism neglected acts. Therefore it failed in its attempt.

The essential act possesses a name. Its name is sacrifice.

Sacrifice signifies neither amputation nor repentance. It is in essence an act. It is the gift of oneself to the being of which one forms part. Only he can understand what a farm is, what a country is, who shall have sacrificed part of himself to his farm or country, fought to save it, struggled to make it beautiful. Only then will the love of farm or country fill his heart, A country—or a farm—is not the sum of its parts. It is the sum of its gifts.

So long as my civilization leant upon God it was able to preserve the notion of sacrifice whereby God is created in the hearts of men. Humanism neglected the essential role of sacrifice. It thought itself able to communicate the notion of Man by words and not by acts. In order to save the vision of Man present in all men, it could do no more than capitalize the word. And mankind was meanwhile moving down a dangerous slope—for we were in danger of mistaking the average of mankind or the arithmetical sum of mankind for Man. We were in danger of mistaking the sum of the stones for the cathedral. Wherefore little by little we lost our heritage.

Instead of affirming the rights of Man present in the individual we had begun to talk about the rights of the collectivity. We had bit by bit introduced a code for the collectivity which neglected the existence of Man. That code explains clearly why the individual should sacrifice himself for the community. It does not explain clearly and without ambiguity why the community should sacrifice itself for a single member. Why it is equitable that a thousand die to deliver a single man from unjust imprisonment. We still remember vaguely that this should be, but progressively we forget it more and more. And yet it is this principle alone which differentiates us from the ant-hill and which is the source of the grandeur of mankind. For want of an effective concept of humanity—which can rest only upon Man—we have been slipping gradually towards the ant-hill, whose definition is the mere sum of the individuals it contains.

What did we possess that we could set up against the religions of the State and of the Party? What had become of our great ideal of Man born of God? That ideal is scarcely recognizable now beneath the vocabulary of windy words that covers it.

 

Little by little forgetting man, we limited our code to the problems of the individual. We have gone on preaching the equality of men. But having forgotten Man, we no longer knew what it was we were preaching. Having forgotten in what men were equal, we enunciated a vague affirmation that was of no use to us. How can there be any material equality between individuals as such—the sage and the brute, the imbecile and the genius? On the material plane, equality implies that all men are identical and occupy the same place in the community; which is absurd. Wherefore the principle of equality degenerates and becomes the principle of identity.

We have gone on preaching the liberty of men. But having forgotten Man, we have defined our liberty as a sort of vague license limited only at the point where one man does injury to another. This seeming ideal is devoid of meaning, for in fact no man can act without involving other men. If I, being a soldier, mutilate myself, I am shot. An isolated individual does not exist. He who is sad, saddens others.

And even liberty of this sort had to be subjected to a thousand subterfuges before we could make use of it. We found it impossible to say when this right was valid and when it was not valid, and as we wanted very much to preserve the vague principle of the thing from the innumerable assaults which every society necessarily makes upon the liberty of the individual, we turned hypocrite and shut our eyes.

As for charity, we have not even dared go on preaching it. There was a time when the sacrifice which created beings took the name of charity each time that it honored God in His image upon earth. By our charity to the individual we made our gift to God, and later to Man. But having forgotten both God and Man, we found ourselves giving only to the individual. And from that moment charity became an unacceptable course. It is society and not the mood of the individual that should ensure equity in the sharing of the goods of this world. The dignity of the individual demands that he be not reduced to vassalage by the largesse of others. What a paradox—that men who possessed wealth should claim the right, over and above their possessions, to the gratitude of those who were without possessions!

But above all our miscomprehended charity turned against its own goal. It was founded exclusively upon feelings of pity with regard to individuals—wherefore it forbade us all educative chastisement. But true charity, being the practice of the rites rendered to Man over and above the individual, taught that the individual must be fought in order that Man grow great.

And thus Man became lost to us. And losing Man we emptied all warmth out of that very fraternity which our civilization had preached to us—since we are brothers
in
something, and not brothers in isolation. It is not by contributions to a pool that fraternity is ensured. Fraternity is the creation of sacrifice alone. It is the creation of the gift made to a thing greater than ourselves. But we, mistaking the very root of all true existence, seeing in it a sterile diminution of our goods, reduced our fraternity to no more than a mutual tolerance of one another.

We ceased to give. Obviously, if I insist upon giving only to myself, I shall receive nothing. I shall be building nothing of which I am to form part, and therefore I shall be nothing. And when, afterwards, you come to me and ask me to die for certain interests, I shall refuse to die. My own interest will command me to live. Where will I find that rush of love that will compensate my death? Men die for a home, not for walls and tables. Men die for a cathedral, not for stones. Men die for a people, not for a mob. Men die for love of Man—provided that Man is the keystone in the arch of their community. Men die only for that by which they live.

The sole reason why our society still seemed a fortunate one, and man seemed still to be distinguishable from the collectivity, was that our true civilization, which we were betraying in our ignorance, still sent forth its dying rays and still, despite ourselves, continued to preserve us.

How was it possible for our enemies to understand this when we ourselves no longer understood it? All that they could see in us was rocks strewn in a field. They sought in their way to lend meaning to the notion of collectivity—a notion we were no longer able to define because we had forgotten the existence of Man. Some of our enemies went straight and lightheartedly away to the most extreme conclusions of logic. Collectivity to them meant an absolute collection. Each stone was to be identical with every other stone. And each stone was to reign alone over itself. This was anarchy; and the anarchists, quite aware of the reverence due to Man, applied its principles rigorously to the individual. The contradictions that were born of that rigor were even greater than those that exist in our society.

Others collected the strewn stones and heaped them up in a field. They preached the rights of the Mass. The formula cannot satisfy; for if it is intolerable that a single man tyrannize a Mass, it is equally intolerable that the Mass oppress a single man.

Still others gathered together those powerless stones and out of their arithmetical sum they formed a State. And their state, too, fails to transcend the men who compose it, is too the mere expression of a sum. It stands for the power of the collectivity delegated into the hands of an individual. It is the reign of one stone—which claims to be identical with the rest—over a heap of stones. This State preaches a code of collective existence which once again we refuse to accept—but towards which, nevertheless, we are slowly moving for want of remembering Man who alone would justify our refusal.

The faithful of that new religion would object to several miners risking their lives to save a single miner entombed, for in that case the rock pile would be injured. Let one of their wounded seem to be slowing down the advance of their army, and they will finish him off. The good of the community is a thing which they perceive in arithmetic—and it is arithmetic that governs them. They learn by their arithmetic that they would incur loss if they sought to transcend themselves and become greater than they are. Consequently they must hate those who differ from them—since they possess nothing higher than themselves with which to fuse. Every foreign way of life, every foreign race, every foreign system of thought is necessarily an affront to them. They have, no power to absorb others, for if we are to convert men to our way we cannot do it by amputating them but must do it by teaching them to express themselves, offering a goal to their aspirations and a territory for the deployment of their energies. To convert is always to set free. A cathedral is able to absorb its stones, which have no meaning but in it. The rock pile absorbs nothing; and for want of power to absorb, it can only crush. It is not astonishing that a rock pile, with its great weight, possesses more power than stones strewn in a Held.

And yet it is I who am the stronger.

I am the stronger provided that I am able to find myself. Provided our Humanism restores Man amongst us. Provided we are able to found our community, and, founding it, make use of the sole efficacious instrument—charity. For our community, as it was when our civilization built it, was no mere sum of interests: it was a sum of gifts.

I am the stronger because the tree is stronger than the materials of which it is composed. It drained those materials into itself. It transformed them into itself. The cathedral is more radiant than any heap of stones. I am the stronger because only my civilization possesses the power to bind into its unity all diversity without depriving any element of its individuality.