Spiritus Mundi
Given by James Covington on September 25th, 2005
“Jim, how do we respond to the world? What can we do that will make a difference? Can we make a difference?” These are the questions that a colleague of mine and I struggled with a few days ago. My friend and colleague, Herb, is a psychologist and shares an office next to mine in the suite where I work. He is a psychotherapist, his wife is a rabbi and he himself, an active member of his wife’s conservative Jewish synagogue. We do not speak often, and when we do it is always engaging and humorous, although less humorous this time.
“Jim, the shadow of death in our world extends so far!” he exclaimed. And I sighed with agreement. It so happened that the reason my friend was so introspective was due to the approaching Jewish High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah and the holiest day, Yom Kippur. In his tradition, the reflection and introspection required to seek forgiveness for one’s sins actually begin now weeks ahead of Yom Kippur.
And so the stormy times in which we live were bearing down upon my friend, as they are for all of us– our nation and our world. Tempests spawned by human hostility and by the forces of nature have left broad swaths of death and destruction in their wake.
I was reminded this week of the poem, “The Second Coming,” by the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yeats published these lines shortly after the end of what we now call the First World War. Yeats and his contemporaries rightly called it The Great War. The war lasted from 1914 to 1918, and it embroiled most of the nations of Europe, along with Russia, the United States, and the Middle East. All told, more than 65 million soldiers were involved in the war. The dead soldiers and civilians numbered more than 20 million.
After surveying the carnage and destruction of the war, Yeats’ poem continues on a note of desperation: “Surely some revelation is at hand; surely the Second Coming is at hand.” In Yeats’ view, the war-ravaged world could only be saved by the return of a messiah—not Jesus of Nazareth this time (Yeats had mostly given up on Christianity), but by the rebirth of what he called a Spiritus Mundi: a spirit of the world.
Reading Yeat’s vision of a new found spirit in the world, reminded me of last Sunday’s sermon about spirituality. On that occasion I focused on the inner dynamic of the term and defined spirituality as the “inner dimension of things.” I also referred to it as something that pulls us back to life, as a goodness that will not let us go. But now, Yeats speaks of a spirit that will rekindle us and save the world from its destruction and collapse.
So how do we find the spirit that will save the world?
Like many of you, I have read this poem often, and I know it well. For some reason, however, the poem caught me off-guard this time, and I began thinking about what insights it has to offer us. When I read the lines about the circling falcon, a fiercely beautiful bird of prey, I immediately thought of the image, omni-present everyday now, of a hurricane turning on an animated weather map. A hurricane too is a whirling maelstrom of terrible beauty. When it strikes, anarchy is loosed upon our homes and our world. Hurricanes are one of the most imposing reminders that there are forces in the universe that human beings simply cannot control.
As if natural disasters are not enough, “blood-dimmed tides” caused by human hatred and folly flood our earth everyday. It was only a year ago, that three hundred and thirty-eight people died, many of them children, in the bloody aftermath of the standoff between Chechen rebels and Russian troops in Beslan. Shamil Basayev, the Chechen guerilla commander, did express regret that so many children died, but he also vowed that such violence will continue.
In the Sudan, it is estimated that in the last two years, 400,000 people from Darfur have died. About forty percent of these people were killed by Sudanese government forces and their Janjaweed militias. Sixty percent died from disease, starvation, and exposure that accompany displacement. It is also estimated that 15,000 people are dying every month, 500 per day. One would hope that in a world filled with memories of mass civilian killings in Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, we would be eager to intervene. Unfortunately, this has not happened. The Economist put the situation succinctly: “While the Sudanese government and the rebels have made excuse after excuse, and the world powers on the Security Council have bickered over each last comma in the proposed resolution, the plight of Darfur’s people has barely improved.”
As Yeats’ presciently noted, “The best lack all convictions, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Man’s inhumanity to man has never been more apparent. What is wrong with humankind?
I have recently returned to reading Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings, plowing through bit by bit, his book “Moral Man and Immoral Society.” Interestingly in last week’s NY Sunday Times Book Review, there is an essay by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. about Niebuhr and why we have forgotten him. Perhaps it is because we Americans prefer to see the future through optimistic lens, as though God would indeed always bless us.
Niebuhr abhorred America’s claim to innocence. He also refused to romanticize human beings as ever onward evolving. Evolving we are, but Niebuhr pointed to the mixed and ambivalent character of human nature—creative impulses matched by destructive impulses; regard for others, overruled by excessive self-regard; the will to power, the individual under constant temptation to play God to history. There is perhaps a constant trend in human affairs toward the perfectibility of mankind, but humankind is not without sin. Never will be, according to Niebuhr.
Conflict and tension are permanent features of history. Justice of this world is born in strife and is always provisional, fragmentary, and insecure. Sin is endemic to the human condition in history. The human being, as a creature whose existence combines both spirit and matter, can sense his own “finitude and fragility” in the universe. Annihilation and meaninglessness threaten all of his hopes, achievements and affections. The human being seeks to ease his anxiety and pretension through faith in God, rather than self, but that faith is always imperfect. And yet, reason alone also falls short. Reason sharpens ethical sensitivity and practice, but ironically it can also sharpen the capacity to rationalize selfishness and the will to power.
This is particularly true in the “collective life.” While individuals in their personal dealings often transcend self-interest, nations dealing with other nations, or social classes have little or no capacity for self-transcendence.
Hence we have the Hitlers and the Stalins and Miloscovics and the Husseins and the Bin Ladens and Zarqawi’s all murderously annihilating “the other humans” in the name of a fantasy faith or political ideology or a perfect nationhood. Political or religious leaders who seek to enact their vision inevitably fall to utopianism and fanaticism and feel obliged to kill who they want.
The U.S. does not stand apart, or remain guiltless and innocent. Niebhur reminds us that the U.S. nearly annihilated a red skinned race and enslaved a black skinned one. While we may uphold our faith in democracy and the freedom it affords its citizens, ironically, we can assume with hubris that we are always in the right, can have what we want and assume the right to pre-empt as we see fit.
And yet, Niebuhr’s realism made it painfully clear that people of genuine good will, whether religious or not, sometimes have to employ distinctly unloving means in the service of love and justice.
To make that distinction is an awful burden to human beings who in their anxiety in the face of death and meaninglessness, often do miss the mark, miscalculate, and do the wrong thing. How can we always know the morally right response?
What finally prevents Niebuhr’s realism from becoming a dark or even cynical vision is the promise of God’s kingdom and his forgiveness. Of course, Niebuhr was known to use Biblical language metaphorically. This is why many of the secular intellectuals of his day respected him. To put it another way, Niebuhr stressed the relevance of “agape” or Christian love, not as a practicable political principle, but as the ideal toward which justice strives. Niebuhr believed that in spite of the terrible limitation on the human being’s moral impulses, the good that pulls at every human heart, call it the better half of human nature, or God, or Kingdom of God, –the good that pulls at every human heart will ultimately be rectified and given meaning, in spite of our ambiguous and partial achievements.
Enter William Butler Yeats: He called for a new Messiah, remember? Not a Jesus, but a “spiritus mundi.” A spirit of the world/ an agape spirit—of understanding good will. It is the highest good, the great unifying force of life. But how is that shaped in our everyday lives?
In our ongoing energetic and searching conversation, Herb and I, off the cuff, came up with three things we can do. They are by no means final or all encompassing, but they are a start:
Herb first mentioned that we need to “bring light into the darkness.” Now that of course is a theme I immediately resonated with. How do we bring light into the darkness? We talked about that. The best answer we came up with was to “live out our faith,” in all aspects of our personal lives. Our faith? Now what’s that? WE agreed it had nothing to do with the religious dogma, but with the good values all religions uphold: the values of compassion, forgiveness, honor, respect, justice and mercy—values embraced by that better nature of human beings and defined by all great religions.
When things are falling apart, we need to express our faith that death and destruction will not have the final word. When times are bad, we may have little evidence that our faith is well founded; sometimes we do not have the courage to believe it ourselves. In other words, despite ample evidence of life’s brokenness, and despite a flood of feelings that all may be lost, we choose, if only for a moment, to live as though the world is whole and healthy. We embrace what we can find of the truth, cherish what we can see of beauty, and respond with what we know of love. I do not suggest that we give up the fight against forces that injure and destroy, only that we remember to give the values we are fighting for a place in our lives. No matter how inconsequential our everyday actions may be to us, they matter to someone, somewhere, somehow. It matters whether we smile, or buy this product, or support that policy, or agree, or disagree, or call, or write, or help, or hope, or love, or forgive. Everything matters. Near the end of his life, Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it this way: “There remains for us only the very narrow way, often extremely difficult to find, of living every day as if it were our last, and yet living in faith and responsibility as though there were to be a great future.” These are wise words, well worth remembering.
The next thing that is important is courage. Courage requires movement and action. Courage means “the state of mind or spirit enabling one to face danger and hardship with resolution.” And sometimes courage always requires sacrifice, giving up convenience and comforts and even some security.
When one of you has changed, thrown off destructive habits, lifted the veil of self-absorption, found new and better reason to hope and love and serve, your redemption has not come without sacrifice. It took courage, but finally you had the guts to shuck off your oily skin however closely it had come to fit you, however accustomed you were to slithering about in it. The same holds true for a nation. Yet, almost uniquely—if we compare today’s compound crisis of a trillion dollar war against terrorism and the greatest natural disaster in American history—the one act our leaders have yet to call on us to perform is common sacrifice.
This is bad for the nation’s heart. The American people have a mighty heart. For it is truly to beat as one heart we must share in our neighbors’ pain. To sacrifice means, literally, “to render sacred.”
It is also bad for the nation’s soul. The further we continue down the road of “borrow and spend” the surer it is that our children and grandchildren will be picking up the tab at the end of it. There will be sacrifice, but we will be asking others to make it, which is the very definition of “soul-destroying.”
And finally, I added the third item, to which Herb also readily agreed: humility. As an individual virtue, humility counters pride. When someone asked St. Bernard to list the four cardinal virtues, he replied, “Humility, humility, humility, and humility.” Life is a gift. None of us earned it. WE all share a common destiny. None of us knows the whole truth, not even those who portend to be on God’s side or the secularists who believe in their own ethical reasoning alone. Lincoln grasped this hard truth of the former when he asserted that we can fight for the right, but let us never assume we know God’s purpose.
Madeline Albright, in speech at Yale Divinity School offered the same insight: “I believe we can unite the world in opposition to the murder of innocent people. But we will never unite the world in support of the idea that Americans have a unique relationship with God or better understanding of God’s will than do worshipers from other cultures or lands” She went on, “We may be ensnared by the temptations to use power to dominate, not simply to help; to value American lives more highly than the lives of others; to squander wealth and consume the world’s resources rather than share and be good stewards of the gifts given to us.” We must remember that ‘every human being counts.’” Wise words, indeed.
And again, Reinhold Niebuhr in 1952 wrote “If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle and the blindness would be induced by hatred and vainglory. More wise words.
In a sentimental and superficially optimistic culture, such gravitas often seems alien. It is perhaps ironic that Niebuhr’s most famous words, taken from a sermon given shortly after Moral Man was written, were intended as a guide for politics and history more than personal spiritual renewal—yet they have become a kind of national motto for individuals at their extremes: “God grant us a grace to accept with serenity that which cannot be changed, courage to change that which can be changed, and wisdom to know the difference.”