Man as Viceroy

by

Gai Eaton

Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Autumn 1973) © World Wisdom, Inc.
www.studiesincomparativereligion.com

ONCE upon a time (but not so very long ago) a European beggar wandered into an Arab cafe in Blida. One of the Moslems there handed him a coin. "Do you think God will take note of such alms-giving?" his companion asked him. "You never know", he told them, "who may be concealed under the appearance of a poor man."

Such prudence would be natural to a Moslem brought up to believe that the Friends of God come and go as they will, disguised now in rags, now in riches, with power to change utterly—when it is God's will—the nature of a situation or the pattern of a life. You never know. Each man's "inner secret" is, they say, known only to God, and each man is to be treated with respect not only because the neighbour is worthy of respect but because he may be quite other than he seems and lightning may lie dormant in his hands.

Sometimes these hands are peacefully clasped, their power showing itself only to save or to heal. So the tale is told of a certain disciple who pestered his Spiritual Master to teach him the Great Name, the secret Name of God that is said to be known only to those who are closest to Him and to carry with it an overwhelming force. Wearied by these constant demands, the Master told his disciple to spend the morning at the city gate and report scrupulously everything that he saw. There was little to report. "I saw the people go in and out. An old man passed with his donkey laden with firewood. A soldier came after him, beat him and seized both his donkey and the wood". The Master asked him what he would have done to the soldier if he had known the Great Name. "I should certainly have demanded his death!" "Well", said the Master, "I must tell you that this old wood-cutter who allowed himself to be maltreated without complaint is none other than he who long ago taught me the Name".

But the lightning is not necessarily controlled by the Friend or Beloved of God, upon whom it rests with the gentleness of Spring sunshine. So the Moslems tell another tale to illustrate the fact that danger as well as mercy inhere in the great ones who walk secretly among us. It is said that the eleventh-century Persian saint, Abu Sa'id, lived for a certain period in great luxury, feasting much and entertaining himself with music and dancing. Those who might readily have recognised his sanctity under the more conventional disguise of poverty were not sharp enough to see through such a mask as this and were duly scandalised. One of them, a certain Amir, pressed for the settlement of a debt. The saint said nothing, did nothing, but the Amir's faithful hunting dogs went mad soon after, turned upon their master and tore them to pieces. God, they say, is not mocked; and those who mock His Friends may create within the natural world such a whirlpool of disorder that they are themselves destroyed.

This is where our human ideas of justice and fairness, serviceable enough for certain purposes, are broken upon contact with a wider scheme of things. The Christian world has known, through many centuries, the legend of the Wandering Jew, that innocent bystander who, when Christ passed with his Cross, called out: "Get on with you! Go faster!" and was therefore condemned to wander the earth until the Day of Judgment, homeless and rejected by all men. How was he to know that this scourged criminal was the Christ? How can we expect the average man to be so constantly on the alert that he is ready for the moment when Reality breaks through the carapace of time like lightning from heaven? But our incapacities are not, though we like to think them so, the measure of all things; and when the harmless little man who lives decently enough in the familiar shadows of the normal world finds himself suddenly in the full blaze of sunlight, he stumbles against the adamantine rock and is broken.

The People of the Book, as the Moslems call those who follow the Bible, were always aware of the presence in the midst of the crowd of individuals who might look like everyone else but who carried with them a breath of air from another place. Both Christian and Jewish legends tell of these mysterious strangers, passing unnoticed except by the few who were sufficiently alert to recognise them for what they were, but the pre-Christian legends of Europe—Germanic as well as Greek—tell the same tale in their stories of the gods disguised as poor wayfarers, strange visitors to the king's palace or the peasant's hut, bearing with them a message or a warning, the solution to a riddle or the secret of some hidden treasure. The same theme appears in Hindu and Buddhist mythology and, indeed, in the myths of almost every ancient people, The Wanderer is everywhere.

But the worlds in which the Wanderer was observed or made his presence known were worlds which, according to the modern view, vastly overestimated man's importance in the scheme of things, attributing to him a supernatural destiny beyond the brief span of his life on earth and supposing him fit for salvation or damnation. Ideas of Heaven and Hell (or, in Eastern terms, of transmigration through superior or inferior cycles of existence) spelt out the importance of human acts and the nature of human responsibilities in terms immediately comprehensible even to the simplest man. What he did in his small corner had a significance beyond the furthest frontiers of time and place, it shook the highest spheres, bringing down on his head either manna from heaven or fire. The human world, touched at so many points by the supernatural or the magical, its windows wide open, its limits undefined, was—in the proper sense of the term—awe-inspiring.

Awe and respect are closely linked. A purely "social" morality, one based upon the practical interests of the community and upon the fact that "misbehaviour" on a wide scale represents a threat to the community's existence, lacks the dimension of awe and must eventually dispense with the idea of respect for the person (not just as a good man or a useful one, but as a man). If the idea of respect has so far survived, at least for purposes of lip-service (the Nazis still found it necessary to justify or misrepresent their actions in terms of an older morality, as do the Communists) this is because the immense shadow of the religious point of view still haunts even the most irreligious of our contemporary societies. It is only fairly recently that God "died".

But if the idea of respect for the person does still survive it has been reduced more and more to the social level and devalued. The word itself has taken on slightly comic undertones and has lost contact with the element of fear that once nourished it, fear of the unknown, fear of the vast regions that may extend behind an ordinary face. Losing "respect" for someone tends more and more to imply that one thinks less well of their character; it means that a judgment has been revised or reversed in the light of some particular action. And this is not the direction in which the roots of respect are to be found.

The limits of judgment become ill-defined if not forgotten in an age which considers man only in his social context. These limits are strict, for it is said that few sins are as grave as the Pharonic sin whereby mortal man attempts to usurp the ultimate Judgment Seat and so, whether he understands the meaning of his act or not, calls himself God. No man can say what another man is worth, for this would require a knowledge of values so infinitely distant from the social realm that it can find human expression only in silence. Respect is rooted in the knowledge that this silence absorbs and annihilates any words that we can speak.

If this were the beginning and the end of the matter, there would be no need to consider where the limits of human judgment lie. Silence may surround us and penetrate everywhere—it is, after all, no more than the reflection of our own inadequacy—but we have voices and must speak. And at every turn of our life in the world—particularly where our livelihood is concerned—we have to judge our fellows in terms of their usefulness for a particular task, their personal attitude to ourselves and their probable future line of conduct. We have to "place" them in the immediate, given context; and we may not have the time or the patience to give much thought to what they are outside this context. But we are also tempted, most of us, at every turn to inflate this practical, "ad hoc" judgment to the dimensions of an absolute one. We are tempted, in fact, to imagine that this momentary situation in the context of which we have made our judgment is of more than passing importance. And, in this sense, the Pharonic sin is the commonest of sins.

Even at this rather careless level, we still stand in danger of grave error if we attempt to deny the right of human love (also understood in its most casual, mundane sense) to eclipse our judgment—without, of course, making this judgment invalid at its own level. Love blind to the facts of a particular character still takes a certain precedence by virtue of the nobility of its origin and ancestry: the silly girl who loves a criminal and finds it necessary (love and vanity being well acquainted) to deny the facts that stare her in the face, the foolish man who loves a whore and finds it necessary (love and vanity being close companions) to suppose her chaste still know more than they think they know—far more than they are thought to know. Lust itself (here understood in the most conventional and pejorative sense) may open windows that are closed to sober judgment and reveal, however briefly, a unity that was always there and always will be. And Moslems tell the tale of a woman saint of fabulous beauty who was followed one evening by a young stranger hoping for a night of pleasure. She led him by devious ways to the meeting place of her companions on the Path and told them, "Here is a true lover. Pour out for him the wine of True Love".

Whatever tends towards the unification of what was formerly separated and whatever brings a glimmer of light—the light of understanding, of fellow feeling, of attention—into what was formerly a place of darkness carries with it some faint stamp of nobility. When love is based upon "illusion", some apparently ludicrous mistake regarding the character of the beloved, we still have to face the fact that the lover spoke the right language even if he did so for the wrong reasons. And sometimes it is enough that a man should speak the right language—we need not be too concerned over his motives.

If moral ideas are to exist at all as a basis for judgment, they can only be based either upon a supernatural pattern (which must necessarily conflict sometimes with the interests of the community) or upon social considerations. Once these social considerations come to be regarded as the only "practical" ones, the legitimate judgments that we make of a man's usefulness here and now soon usurp a quality of absoluteness. Any group which provides shelter and nourishment for men and a way for them to live together without cutting one anothers' throats has certain rights of self-protection, and these are likely to include the right to kill a man whose actions are totally incompatible with the group's well-being and safety. But this is still a matter of judgment within a given context and related only to that context, a judgment that may be correct here and now but might be quite wrong under different circumstances and at another time. It is when we try to change a man, to "re-form" him and make him fit for our own particular social matrix that we overstep the mark.

Society may have the right to inflict many kinds of punishment in its own defence, but there is one right it does not have and this is to deprive a human being of his ultimate dignity, treating him as inferior in essence and nature, and arrogating to itself the task of making something "better" out of him. We live in an age in which the virtues of kindness tend to be rated above all others and in which the infliction of pain is—at least in certain Western countries—regarded as peculiarly obscene, but it is a pity that we cannot foster these virtues without losing sight of certain other considerations. For there is also an element of obscenity and insult implicit in the act of shutting up a grown man in a hideous but hygienic establishment in which he is treated as though he were a delinquent child. The whip may be cruel compared with the model prison, but the whipped man recovers whereas the prisoner who suffers daily humiliation and deprivation of his manhood does not always recover.

Society's right of self-defence against its enemies carries with it some obligation to treat these enemies as equals. In a different context (that of colonialism) the Jamaican author John Hearne has written perceptively of the rival merits—or demerits—of the kindly European as against other, less kind colonizing powers. "Other conquerors had demanded the usual payments of money, forced labour and women; but the Europeans demanded perpetual acknowledgement of irremediable inferiority... They committed the unforgivable humiliation of turning the world into an enormous elementary school in which the white-skinned were the destined teachers and the dark-skinned could never, at their most responsible, be more than playground monitors. It is doubtful whether the most extreme example of savage plunder has ever been more destructive of human dignity than this weird combination of racial pride and social conscience".

This attitude towards subject races was characteristic of the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, and it derived to some extent (at least in its later development) from the theory of evolution and from the technological cleverness which appeared to provide visible proof of the European's evolutionary superiority. But if we drop the word `racial', then it can be said that a weird combination of pride and social conscience lies at the root of the modern attitude to those who are considered either inferior or unfortunate.

In many cases—though not always explicitly—the idea of "inferiority" has been substituted for that of "wickedness". Whereas wickedness often inspires fear, inferiority does not and it is obviously easier to treat the inferior man kindly than the wicked one. In this sense, "anti-social elements" as they are now described in a number of countries, are better off under the new dispensation. It is perhaps ungrateful of such "elements" to feel that they would rather be treated as rogues than as foolish children.

To say that certain types of criminal behave like children or have the mentalities of children is a very loose figure of speech. One need only place such a man beside a real child to be aware of this. And only a society that has begun to see itself as absolute and as encompassing the horizon—rather than as an island of safety in a menacing and mysterious sea—could assume so readily that those who do not fit into its scheme of things must be less than men.

At the same time, by the substitution of ideas of reform and readjustment for the idea of punishment, society loses the chance of satisfying one of its darkest but most pressing needs. There are certain crimes (child-murder is one of them) which arouse in many people a horror and an anger that must find an outlet or fester inwardly. The normal outlet lies in the satisfaction of seeing the criminal suffer in his own body something of the horror that he has inflicted both upon his victims and upon his society. But this involves treating him as a man, an equal, rather than as a sickly inferior. This need finds satisfaction, not in humiliating but in hurting him, and however savage it may seem (savage as grief) it does hark back to the ancient awareness that a really monstrous crime disturbs the equilibrium—and health—of the human community in such a way that order and balance can be restored only by a monstrous punishment. Two "blacks" may not make a "white", but they do on occasion balance and therefore annul each other in the harsh scales of natural life.

From another point of view, however, it is just as well that we have become kinder, for the imperfections of human "justice" are no longer compensated by the inefficiency of the available means of catching and holding the criminal. It might be said that society has a right to punish only as long as its enemy has a chance to escape. In an age of escape-proof prisons and closed frontiers, the saving grace of incompetence no longer balances the pseudo-absolute operations of human judgment. On the day that the late Dr. Crippen was arrested by the use of transatlantic radio we were, perhaps, deprived of the right to execute murderers. And now the passport has its place among the sinister paraphenalia of our age.

The claims of human society and of human "justice", since they could never be absolute, have always derived their legitimacy from the fact that they were localised, their arm short though it might be strong. Their physical range was limited and there were always other places to which not only the criminal but also the victim, the odd-man-out, could take himself in voluntary exile. A man might "disappear", and his society would not pursue him, could not pursue him. But when relative rights and relative justice become inexorable they lose thereby all legitimacy. From then on it is catch as catch can.

One of the most striking signs of the increasing power of society to engulf its members and to suffocate them is this closing of the frontiers to all but approved travellers, a power that is reinforced by increasingly efficient technological devices. The State's chief requirement, if it aims at absolute dominance over the human being, is that he should not be free even to day-dream of escape. Immigration regulations and currency restrictions, combined with the exercise of many States of the power to issue or withhold passports, have in the course of only a few years blocked the last loopholes and brought very close the "ideal" situation in which the only means of physical escape from a given social matrix will be either through suicidal violence or through suicide itself.

And yet, leaving to one side the case of those whose centre of awareness is removed to quite another level of being—for that is not a matter of escape but of profound involvement in the fountain and origin of human affairs—there remains the escape-hatch of insanity. It may be that this will be put to increasing use as the last physical frontiers are sealed to all but those who have no need or inclination to escape. And this could be one of the means whereby societies that have usurped the quality of absoluteness will destroy themselves without any need for a bolt from heaven to open them up. When men of good sense have gone too far in rationalising the social structure and in cementing its walls the time has come for the madmen to take over.

As with the poor man (and sometimes the rich one), as with the criminal, so with the lunatic. Although insanity, unlike poverty or criminality, does still inspire a certain fear and an inkling of strange seas washing against the shores of our island. This fear, however, has become separated from the sense of awe and is deplored by the best authorities: we should, so we are told, pity the insane in exactly the same way that we pity the physically sick. It is only the insane themselves who disagree with this view and they, of course, are mad. But insanity is not always purely negative in character. A man may have "lost his wits" but, for good or ill, something else may have taken their place. He is seldom no more than a person from whom some part has been amputated in the sense in which a one-legged man is simply a man who has lost a leg. And when we treat him as such he feels obscurely but deeply insulted even if we are quite unaware of our own impertinence. It is not surprising that so many of the doctors who work in mental asylums seem to their friends a little "unbalanced": in a certain sense they have been in daily contact with other worlds of experience that have something of the same self-sufficient coherence that our world seems to possess.

In the Islamic world insanity has tended to evoke a certain awe and respect based, no doubt, upon the Moslem's traditional prudence: "You never know..." But when the Quoranic revelations descended upon the Prophet Muhammad they pressed upon his physical body with an almost intolerable weight and Moslems have been particularly aware of the tremendous strength required if one is to stand and survive under the touch of the divine hand. They expect to find among the insane some who, for all their excellence, were not strong enough to bear this touch and whose worldly personalities became disordered under its weight. In this context, moving among such principalities and powers as may have consumed or possessed the inmates of a madhouse—or perhaps under the shadow of a more absolute and transcendent presence—the psychiatrist who does not walk warily is a true babe in the woods.

And here we are not far from the roots of true charity understood not as a supernatural virtue but as the rugged element in prudent self-interest that, in Thibon's view, provides fertile soil for the seminal action of grace. In terms of social morality, charity is replaced by "social justice" and by the ideal of an egalitarianism that will eventually make it obsolete; but, in terms of realism, charity begins with the awareness of our ignorance as to whom it is we face when we face our neighbour or a stranger, a poor man, a thief... When royalty slips in the mud every hand is held out to help; and this same fear of offending one who might hold our fate in his hands dictated the prudent charity of other times—unless it was translated to a more universal level and ignorance was replaced by the knowledge of an implicit omnipresent royalty.

"Tell all the truth", wrote the American poetess, Emily Dickenson, "but tell it slant", Outside the field of mathematics there are sound reasons for speaking, if not in riddles, at least in terms of implication and allusion, parable and even hyperbole, rather than in bald statements which, taken too literally, lead to the petrifaction of meaning. Neither the facilities of human speech nor the contours of the human mentality lend themselves readily to the expression of truths which lie beyond the sphere of day-to-day affairs. But there are points at which the direct statement, however liable it may be to misunderstanding, becomes unavoidable. Any discussion of man's real identity leads to such a point.

What is man in terms of the doctrines by which men have lived through all ages? He is, according to the Christians, made in the very Image of God. For the Moslems, he is the Viceroy placed by a transcendent Master in and over creation. For the Hindus his inmost core is one with the eternal and infinite Brahman, beside which there exist only dreams and shadows: "That art thou!" And for numberless "primitive" peoples he is the central being who, unlike anything else in the creation that surrounds him, has the power to journey to and fro as message-bearer between heaven and earth. We—human-kind—have until now thought him the one alone of all that enjoy the light of day who can speak with the voice of ultimate authority and act as arbiter of all things under the sun.

This is the idea that lies at the root of all prayer and all priesthood. This is what men have lived by since the ages which preceded the "dawn of history" even as history itself precedes today's newspaper. Man is either Viceroy or else he is an animal that claims special rights by virtue of its cunning and the devouring efficiency of teeth sharpened by technological instruments, an animal whose time is up. If he is such an animal, then he has no rights—he is no more nor less than meat—and elephants and lions, rabbits and mice must in some dim recess of their being rejoice to see the usurper developing the means of his own total destruction. But if he is Viceroy, then all decay and all trouble in the created world that surrounds him is in some measure to be laid to his count.

There is no getting around this choice—any more than the man with a gun can be evaded by retreat into a dream-world. If man is what he now thinks himself, then every acre of ground that he takes from the other beasts is stolen property and every time he kills an animal one of his kind should be slaughtered to keep the scales even. But if he is what, until now, he thought he was, then he bears on his infirm back the whole burden of creation, a stumbling, staggering creature—a nobleman who has taken to drink and exhausted himself with whores—unless he can call upon a supernatural source of strength. Even then there is no guarantee that his back will not break.

The complete fulfilment of the viceregal function belongs, no doubt, to Adam before the fall, to the Golden Age, to the earthly Paradise, and we in our shabby place cannot afford to be perfectionists or to whine that what cannot be done well should not be done at all. The important distinction now is not between those who do it well and those who do it ill, but between those who recognise this potentiality in man and those who are blind to it. This is the shadow of glory that overhangs the scruffy fellow in the lane, this is why the prudent man is convinced that "you never know". For the very pavements may be waiting for the coming of the Wanderer. "The saint has himself become prayer, the meeting place of earth and Heaven; and thus he contains the universe, and the universe prays with him".[1]

If man has a place above the web of "eating and being eaten", above natural process, this is due to him not on account of his inventive genius, his intellectual superiority to the monkeys or his capacity to generalise about the nature of inter-stellar space nor is it founded upon his noble emotions or idealistic altruism or upon the power to travel faster than a horse. It lies only in his unique responsibility for coping with the burden of creation. As long as he has one-hundredth of a part of this awareness of his task, he is still man, and perhaps a thousandth part will do, but at some point, eventually, the dilution becomes excessive until at last he is no more than one of the lesser beasts among those which crop the grass or devour their kindred.

The relationship of human beings to the animal world, as it is documented in history and anthropology, is immensely complex and it is surprising that no full-scale study of the subject ever seems to have been undertaken. Outside the Christian world, however, this attitude has tended to crystallise around two opposite poles, with many variations in between. On the one hand there is the virtual refusal to make use of animals except for domestic purposes, hence vegetarianism and the ritual ban on the wearing of anything made from animal skin. Against this we have the ritual of hunting tribes, aimed at "reconciling" the animal soul to its fate, and the Moslem and Jewish "sacrifice" of the animal that is to lend its flesh to the fostering of human strength (a strength that is to be used in a work of redemption which includes the animal creation). Closely related to both poles we find the belief (present also in the annals of early Christianity) that carnivorous beasts become gentle as lambs in the presence of a holy man. But never at either pole or anywhere along the line that joins them do we find any suggestion that man has absolute rights over the animals, to do with them as he pleases.

A stern insistence upon courtesy to the living creatures that share our world with us in common to the most diverse religious traditions. If a cobra comes into your garden, says a Moslem book of spiritual instruction, you may order it to leave at once. If it returns you should give it a second warning. And if it returns for the third time you are free to kill it.

To treat such counsels as whimsical is to miss the point completely and to fall into the common contemporary error of dismissing fifty percent of the truth that comes our way as belonging to the realm of fairy tales and ignoring the other fifty per cent as "metaphysical"—and therefore incomprehensible or else irrelevant. The point of this particular story is that man by virtue of his "central", viceregal position enjoys certain special privileges but does not enjoy the right to abuse these privileges. And the courtesy which it recommends is a courtesy based on awe and respect for all that lives. Also, no doubt, upon a certain sense of equality (to which countless traditional tales bear witness), not quite the same equality as that between man and man, but a relative equality nonetheless (those same traditional tales cite plenty of examples of the divinity manifesting itself through an animal). Formerly the world was thought to be made up of men and beasts; today it is a "human" world in which coal and oil and edible animals are counted among exploitable riches which exist only for our use.

But the attitude of respect and courtesy is far removed from the sentimentality which finds expression in such a dog-picture caption as this "See his looks—soulful, gentle, loving, loyal and almost human!" This is only too obviously the reverse side of the picture which includes our animal factories and the highly imaginative medical experiments carried out on animals. But the words "almost human" give the show away. Certain petted animals remind us of ourselves at our most soulful, gentle, loving and loyal and so long as we are kind to doggies and pussy-cats we need not be too troubled by the thought of less gentle and less loyal creatures exploited for our use. And indeed if the only claim that the beasts had upon us was based upon the fact that sometimes they can appear almost human we would be quite right to destroy them whenever it suits us.

There is, however, a dark and threatening implication behind all the precautions with which men of earlier times surround themselves in their dealings with the animal world: the implication that abuse of these creatures can only lead to our own destruction and that what we do to them will eventually, by a simple process of cause-and-effect, be done to us. It was not for nothing that the North American Indian hunter underwent the most elaborate rituals of purification before taking on himself the huge responsibility of killing animals so that, clothed and fed, his people might continue to carry out their work of mediation between heaven and earth.

By some curious irony, it is chiefly since men came to see themselves as no more than specially clever animals, without any "central" role, without any supernatural privileges, that they have treated the animal creation as totally alien and without rights of its own. But this must surely be passing a phase: the simple fact that "animal" = animal will sooner or later impose its logic and we shall see that the idea of special treatment for the two-legged as against the four-legged is mere sentimentality. There are hundreds of millions of people in the world who get in the way of progress and, indeed, threaten civilisation. Their bones and their fatty substances could be put to good use.

Meanwhile, as always, the world is full of mirrors and the animal creation still shows men their own reflection. It is perhaps an ogrish reflection, though it is not much noticed nowadays. For if the people of our time are fearful of shadows and worry themselves sick over trifles, it is also true that they are strangely unafraid when fear might seem more justified. Terrified of material insecurity, quick to obey authority and watchful of their pension rights, they stand up like heroes to tempt Providence and to commit outrages that could hardly be expected—in any world that made any kind of sense—to go unpunished. But real heroes know what they are doing, what they risk; whereas we whine indignantly about the nuclear bomb or bacteriological warfare as though these things threatened us by accident, the fault of a few naughty politicians and scientists.

One of the earliest of the Moslem "Sufis" maters told his disciples, "When I commit a fault, I am made aware of it by my donkey's temper", and the Islamic tradition is full of stories to illustrate the manner in which the animals hold up a mirror to man and reflect in their behaviour the success or failure of his manhood, as also the fear they have of all who are deeply involved in a human "worldliness" that ultimately threaten them. So Dermenghem tells of a student of Fez so poor that he lived in a cave and his single robe was in tatters. A gazelle used to come every night and sleep beside him in his cave and all the dogs in the neighbourhood rejoiced when he passed. But one day his mother made a collection among his fellow students and, unknown to him, sowed a bag of money into his robe. That evening, when he climbed back to his cave, the dogs ran snapping and barking at his heels and, when we reached it, the gazelle fled from him. Late in the night, sleepless and troubled, he found the bag of money and flung it far from him. Before dawn the gazelle returned and next morning, when he went down the hill, the dogs danced for joy.

And it is said that the Companions once asked the Messenger of God, "Shall we be rewarded for good done to animals?" "There will be a reward", he said, "for whoever quenches the thirst of any creature endowed with a living heart".

But matters would still be comparatively simple if the inmost cores of responsibility reached outwards no further than the circle of living beings and stopped there. It does not stop there. At the heart of the most diverse religious traditions lies the doctrine that viceregal responsibility encompasses our environment as a whole and that the distinction between animate and inanimate is not final, that wood and stone and the very soil itself are within the circle of man's power to redeem or to abuse. If Christianity has sometimes neglected this side of the matter, as Islam and Judaism have not, this is because the attention of Christians has been so focussed upon a single act of universal Redemption that the call to "imitate" Christ has been understood only in the most superficial, moral sense.

In order to fulfil our function we must make some use of our environment for food, for clothing, for the instrument of our trade and indeed for the actual deployment of the possibilities that lie within us, but the enjoyment of the good things available to us is conditional—"For the earth is the Lord's", say the Christians, and it is not as owners that we make use of it. The fear of "demons" (inhabiting inanimate matter or haunting the dark corners of the world) which has been found so widely among "primitive" peoples and dismissed by anthropologists as "animism" or the personification of natural objects, is a vestigial trace of the once universal knowledge that all things have a claim upon us, a claim which, if it is ignored must bring certain consequences in its train—it is not demons but consequences that haunt the dark forest, as they do the madman's dreams—and the praise of poverty that is found at some point in all religions has a more than personal, moral significance, implying as it does that man is to be parsimonious in the use he makes of his natural environment and is not free to treat it as children treat a bag of sweets.

Obligations, however, carry privileges with them (the reverse side of this coin is a platitude) and man has the special power of being able to take the inanimate into his hands and make it beautiful. This, one might say, is the exercise of his redemptive power—to bring into the light of day the meaning that is only implicit in brute matter and to give form to what was until then no more than a dark, inchoate longing for the miracle of form. Here, most of all, the clumsy two-legged one can call himself King of the Castle, bestowing nobility where he will; and here is the contradiction to all fear and all parsimony, if only a man were big enough to get a grip on the very globe itself and bring out its meaning.

All sacred art is rooted in the certainty that the artist, by virtue of his "central" role and by the skill with which he fulfils his role, acts as a channel through which the patterns of heaven enlighten the material of our earthly environment. And the forms and canons of a particular artistic tradition exist to express meaning in exactly the same way that the words of a particular language exist, not merely as pleasing sounds, but as tools with which to say something. The making of things that are themselves meaningful in terms of a specific artistic language and the incorporation of these things into a human realm that is saturated with meaning is in essence a "viceregal" function; and in this case matter has been twice blessed, first by becoming a vehicle of meaning and then by participation in the ritual and religious life whereby the human community maintains contact with the source of meaning itself.

Here then we have two concepts, two attitudes between which there can be no reconciliation: on the one hand, a world that is material for the creation of beauty; on the other, a world that is fodder for the human animal and grist for his mills. And here also we are reminded of the distinction made earlier between that which is drawn out of the river of change for enduring use, and that which is merely devoured and excreted in the process of man's "metabolism with nature". In terms of that reverence for the natural world which, like respect for the animal realm, was once normal to man, beauty is never a luxury—it is an essential condition of use.

"We of the 19th and 20th centuries have the unenviable distinction of having created the first ugly civilisation in the long history of mankind. The industrial age has brought innumerable benefits, but it has created an environment for man that is visually little short of a nightmare".[2] There are those who would say that this environment is itself the product of a nightmare—one in which man as such has lost his dignity and his heritage, reduced to the status of a dumb beast in a world without meaning and consumed by his own ravenous appetites.

The riches of the modern world are unearned riches, for it is only by fulfilling some small part of his viceregal function that man earns the right to make use of his environment. We see a caricature of this belief in the contemporary view that "unearned incomes" are wicked and that we have a right only to what we earn by our mental or physical labour (labour that is, by definition, a labour of exploitation); whereas the ancient view was that man has earned what he is able to assimilate spiritually, what he can love as well as use and what he can raise from obscurity into the daylight of beauty and significance. Whatever else he takes to himself is stolen property.

Social morality, censorious of theft from our own kind, cannot take account of responsibility to and for creation. At any and every time conflicts must arise between the "two moralities" (though they are in fact situated at different levels and must therefore be in some measure complementary to each other), but when the very idea of a duty beyond that which we owe to our neighbour is lost sight of or dismissed as irrelevant to human needs, then social morality inflates to fill the vacuum and, from being functional, becomes "absolute". At the same time it changes character, becoming more and more a question of self-interest (or what is thought to be self-interest) writ large. The beast that digs and forages and consumes, blind to everything but its immediate needs, is then no longer the individual man: it is the social collectivity as a whole, making use of its power to appeal to the "better natures" of its component individuals (in terms of morality, altruism and other high-sounding principles) the better to subordinate them to its ultimately self-destroying purpose. For the short-sightedness of self-interest is proverbial and social morality, no longer dwarfed by the vision of horizons wider than those of the "human animal", must eventually degenerate into the attitude of a parasite greedily unaware that it is destroying its host.

Such a situation as ours, in which the common assumptions of this particular moment in time are imposed upon everyone by a vast educational machine, can be "put in its place" only if it is set in juxtaposition to some totally different situation based upon quite other assumptions regarding the nature and destiny of man. Contemporary science fiction has been used on a number of occasions to drive home the point that our world is not necessarily The World and that our way of life is not the only way open to rational beings, but it is not really necessary to reach out to the stars in order to make comparisons. In the past two hundred years the European has destroyed or corrupted a great number of ancient cultures which, if we have the courage and the honesty to look into the mirror they provide, show us all that we need to know of ourselves.

No history has ever been written of this cultural holocaust (for the Communists are by no means alone in making history fit theory). A man might usefully make a lifetime study of the impact of Western civilisation upon some corner of Asia or Africa without exhausting the lessons to be drawn from it. But, for our present purpose, the most striking and the most illuminating examples lie in the very heartland of the modern world—in the encounter between the invading palefaced people and the "Indians" of North America.

There were, at the time of the European invasion, some six hundred Indian nations or social groups in America north of the Rio Grande. Between them they brought to life—and lived out in body and soul—an astonishing variety of religious and social patterns, so that it might be said that if no other human beings had ever existed on the face of the earth the richness of human possibilities would still have had its flowering.

And yet there was a certain unity in the midst of this astonishing diversity, the factor of unity being the realisation or actualisation—under many different forms—of man's viceregal identity. Indeed, it could be said that this factor of unity was itself the source out of which all this rich diversity flowed. A prophetic genius which was once, perhaps, the distinguishing quality of the human as against the animal creature survived in that strangely virgin land of forest and mountain, plain and desert, long after it had become—for other races—no more than a rumour voiced in myth and dubious history.

It was almost as though, for this small segment of humanity, the world was not yet a fallen world (although, from another point of view, the hardness of the Indian's life and his deep awareness of pain suggest that it was only by an act of supreme heroism that he preserved a flavour of the Golden Age in a darkened universe). In his relationship with the natural world and with the beasts around him and, above all, in his intimate awareness of the neighbourly powers of heaven, he was a living exemplar of human qualities that are scarcely dreamed of in our time. It is an exemplar that should have a particular appeal for an age which often makes a "cult" of the development of the human personality; for the chief object of the Indian's art was himself.

This art, says Schuon, is "concentrated, direct and bold", a framework for the human person. In the midst of an intensely perceived environment of landscape, of sky and stars, of natural elements and wild beasts, this man wore the garments of one who knows himself to be king of the great castle of creation: "his majestic head-dresses (above all his great array of eagle feathers), his dress streaming with fringes and embroidered with solar symbols, the bright-patterned mocassins which seem designed to take away from the feet all heaviness and all uniformity, the feminine robes of an exquisite simplicity..." [3] Man dresses the part that his culture tells him he is called upon to play, but in traditional societies he dresses (or paints himself) also as a means of showing in visible form the true identity that is hidden within the bodily shell. If he dresses as a "god", this is because he believes the "god" inhabits his innermost being, and his costume is like a mask which expresses what is most enduring in him, covering the plasticity of flesh, which changes, ages from year to year (an image of becoming and of our incorporation in the flux of time), with a changeless image.

The North American Indian, says Schuon, had no intention of "fixing" himself on this earth, where things crystallise or petrify in time if they do not evaporate: "this explains his aversion to houses, expecially stone ones, and also the absence of writing which, from his perspective, would 'fix' and 'kill' the sacred flow of the spirit... The Red man's sanctuary is everywhere; and this is also why the earth should remain intact, virgin and sacred, as when it left the Divine Hands..."[4] For many of the nomadic tribes, the notion of putting plough or spade to the earth would have been exactly comparable to what desecration of the High Altar is for the Christian. In certain of his rites he humbled himself before the whole of creation, because all visible things were created before him and, being older than he, deserved respect; but, at the same time, man was preeminent because he alone was capable of knowing the "Great Spirit" (Wakan Tanka,in Sioux terms). As Viceroy he knew and listened to his Master, and as Viceroy he respected and spoke to his province.

In order to discern the tragic nature of the white man's impact upon such a culture as this it is not essential to believe that the Indians view of the world was correct, although this was the kind of view that humanity has taken through most of its history, and even the most brash newcomer must surely hesitate before dismissing it out of hand. The one essential is that we should put aside for a moment the conviction that our way of living and thinking and acting is the only valid way and look with unprejudiced eyes upon this particular "clash of cultures".

But if one believes that the modern view stands in relation to the traditional beliefs of our kind as an aberration (or simply as a state of "ignorance" in the exact sense of the term), then what happened was not merely tragic, it was diabolical. The destruction of bridges that link heaven and earth, providing men with the means of fulfilling their viceregal function, is always a diabolical thing and must be expected to bring in its train the most appalling consequences for the world as a whole.

"The conscious, calculated, methodical—and by no means anonymous—destruction of the Redskin race, of their traditions and of their culture, in Northern America and partly also in South America" says Schuon, "far from having been an inevitable process... remains in reality one of the greatest crimes and one of the most arrant acts of vandalism of which history has retained the memory."[5] Since the presence in their midst of people who find meaning in the world is intolerable to those who think themselves the victims of a meaningless universe, the basic structure of his spiritual existence had to be destroyed. "First, in the Sioux country, the Army crushed the Sun Dance with armed force. Then the missionaries influenced the Bureau of Indian Affairs to impose regulations against not only the Sun Dance but all 'pagan' ceremonies which, they believed, impeded the progress of the Indians towards Christian civilisation. The Interior Department framed a criminal code forbidding Indian religious practices..."[6] But it was not as Christian missionaries, trying to impose one code of meaning upon another, that the white man descended upon the Indians. It was as a horde in which rapacity had already destroyed the spiritual heritage which had been its birthright.

These invaders differed from those others who, in one part of the world or another, had burst their frontiers in an access of super-abundant energy, because they alone had achieved the capacity to look upon everything in creation as material for exploitation, seeing a tree only as timber, a lamb only as meat and a mountain only as the site for a quarry. This single-minded rapacity, now taken for granted as "natural" to man, was so strange to the Indians of the 18th and 19th centuries that the invaders might as well have come from another planet. Even their descendants hesitate to speak of the "nameless thing" for which their languages offer no appropriate term —the combination of greed and fraud and perfidy which they encountered in their dealings with the white man. Nothing in their previous experience had forewarned them that men could be like that.

But rapacity breeds its own skills, and the invaders, though to Indian eyes they appeared ignorant, physically dirty, mostly drunken and, in general, both godless and lawless, carried dreadful weapons in their hands and enjoyed all the advantages which the unprincipled enjoy in their dealings with those for whom honour is paramount. The hordes spread out over a land of almost magical richness, untapped, unravaged, in which the very trees had been regarded as temple pillars and the earth itself too sacred to be trodden except by winged mocassins, and congratulated themselves upon pursuing so worthily their civilising mission.

For the victims of this mission there could only be, in the words of a former U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, "sadness deeper than imagination can hold—sadness of men completely conscious, watching the universe being destroyed by a numberless and scorning foe..."[7] John Collier, who had a unique opportunity to know these people and who wrote of them, "They had what the world has lost... The ancient, lost reverence and passion for human personality joined with the ancient, lost reverence and passion for the earth and its web of life," emphasises the quality of sadness rather than anger in the Indian's assessment of his dealings with the white man. Perhaps this sadness includes a certain pity for all of us, since humanity is ultimately indivisible.

It was on land long held sacred (and kept intact from human scarring) and from particles of matter once thought to be beads in the garment of the "Great Spirit" that the first nuclear weapons were developed. And there, high over the land which had once been too holy to suffer the touch of spade or plough, the first of the "mushroom clouds" spread its grim canopy.

When the Westerner is asked in what period of history he would have chosen to be born, had the choice been offered him, he chooses—if he is sensible—the present day. He is a twentieth-century man with a twentieth century face and twentieth-century emotions. Transported, just as he is, to some other period of time he would be unspeakably miserable. But when he assumes that the people of other times must have led lives of complete wretchedness because he, in their place, would be wretched, he is allowing subjectivism to run away with his judgment. He needs all that the modern world can offer in the way of richness and he could do with more of it, but this need is in fact an aspect of his twentieth-century nature and he has no grounds for supposing that all men in all times have had similar needs.

The invalid must have comforts and delicacies for which the healthy man would have no use, and if we are deprived of our real function in the universe then we are indeed sick with the most debilitating and demoralising of diseases, that of uselessness. If the human creature is—as was generally supposed—designed for the use of God, as a channel of communication between his given world and all that lies beyond it, then he will not find satisfaction in serving other masters. The service of his fellow creatures or of the State or of some "ideal" can never be more than a substitute and, when time has worked its disillusionment, the exhausted "do gooder", the worn component of the State machine and the embittered idealist are not really so very different to the ageing man who has pursued enjoyment throughout his life and has come now to the end of the road.

"We have the possibility," said Simone Weil, "of being mediators between God and the part of creation which is confided to us. Our consent is necessary, so that through us he should perceive his own creation..."[8] adding, later in the same book, "Every creature who has come to perfect obedience constitutes a singular mode, unique, irreplaceable, of the presence, knowledge and operation of God in the world".[9] When man is called upon to break down the obstructions raised by his own anxious and demanding selfhood this is not because "unselfishness" is a socially useful virtue: it is in order that he may provide a clear channel through which grace may descend and vivify the things of the world and through which the achieved glories of the world may be, as it were, carried back to their source. Our immortality is as a window, not as a wall.

But men are not conceived to remain for ever embryos—or for ever children, adults or old men. Nor is a child to be considered simply as an undeveloped adult, or an aged man as an adult in decay. In our ultimate identity we are all that we have ever been together with all that we are yet to be, and if a man's life makes sense it does so as a whole, not in terms of this or that cross-section apparent at a given moment, but as it might be seen from beyond time. Now, said the Rabbi Baalshem on his death-bed, now I know why I was born!

The pattern of any given life can be seen only when it is completed. It is said that some few are so gifted that they can perceive the outlines of the whole from a small fragment of action— just as the decisive qualities of a man's character may sometimes show themselves in a mannerism or in the way he reacts to a particular crisis (for there is a sense in which the whole must be expressed in every part)—but this is outside the competence of ordinary human judgment, which generalises too readily from the fragmentary. Masking, as we have seen is often a sympton of a man's need to disguise characteristics which he knows are not really significant in terms of his true identity but by which he would be judged and assessed if he allowed them to be seen. In the same way that a profound maturing of the personality is often preceded by a period of great uneasiness and even of physical illness, so a man's best qualities may first show themselves in clumsy and inept forms, the personality as such taking its first awkward steps at a new level. There are human states which can be judged only in terms of what they will lead to in ten or twenty years time.

The freedom we require of society is the freedom to actualise what in truth we are. "For Thou hast said, 'Although I know thy secret, nevertheless declare it now in thine outward act'".[10] Just as the artist is called upon not so much to impose meaning upon material objects as to bring out into the light of day a significance already inherent in them, so man as such is called upon to show—within the limits of the earthly context—what his real name is; for, says Rumi, "that which is our end is really our Name with God".[11]

If man is a "central" being, a Viceroy, as the traditional doctrines of humanity maintain, then this is the starting point of his acts of self-revelation. But there are as many ways of exercising the viceregal function as there are living men. "Everyone", says Martin Buber (quoting a Chassidic saying), "should know and remember that his state is unique in the world and that no one ever lived who was exactly the same as he, for had there ever been anyone exactly the same as he there would have been no need for him to have existed; but in reality each person is a new thing in the world, and he should make his individuality complete, for the coming of the Messiah is delayed through it not being complete".[12]

And in this the Jews voice another’s belief that is implicit in the most diverse traditional teachings, the belief that the created world itself exists so that certain possibilities—a store of latent meaning—which can find outward expression only in the peculiar conditions of space and time may be demonstrated and exhausted, and that creation cannot come to its end and its final redemption until all that can be said has been said and all that can be done has been done. The fulfilment of these possibilities is yet another aspect of the viceregal function and therefore of human responsibility.

Indeed, it is here that responsibility starts, acting upon the first of all the things we are given to act upon—our own most intimate individuality—and so working its way from the centre outwards towards the peripheral world. But when we consider a particular being's success or failure in expressing what he exists to express (so far as we can guess at it) we have to keep one essential fact in view: this achievement does not necessarily obey the laws of growth and maturity as we know them, and it may show itself in youth (or even in childhood), so that the rest of this particular life-span seems like a dusty anti-climax, or it may flower in old age, like a bloom on a dying plant, when all the useful powers of mind and body have fallen into decay. Its timing is not by our clocks.

But any talk of "individuality" carries with it, particularly in the modern context, certain grave dangers of misunderstanding. Too often it suggests a self-enclosed "subject" set down in a predominantly hostile world of "objects", and this "subject" or person is regarded as a complex of thoughts and emotions, hereditary and acquired characteristics, rolled into a ball that is then kicked and buffetted by "outside" circumstances. We cannot begin to understand the traditional view of man unless we realise that these circumstances are themselves an aspect of the individuality insofar as they are its destiny.

The ultimate "subject", the innermost core of man's being, is not perceived by the mind, the emotions or the senses. These are objects of its awareness. There is no radical distinction to be made between what a man is given in the way of mind, emotional make-up and body on the one hand and, on the other, what he is given in the way of outward circumstances and environment. Together they form a significant whole and all are aspects of a particular individual life.

The being between birth and death scrawls—in matter and in events—a pattern which, taken as a whole, expresses his unique identity. This man, So-and-So, is not a sealed personality moving through an alien environment. He is the sum total of all that he does and all that happens to him and all that comes within his range, spread out (from our point of view) in time and space, but a single, timeless fact in the mind of God. What we are and where we are cannot ultimately be divided. And to accept our destiny is to accept ourselves, recognising that what happens to us is as much a part of our nature—in the widest sense—as_, the most initmate contours of our own selfhood. It is sometimes said that the fatal bullet has its victim's name upon it and fits no other flesh.

In the last resort, a man looks at the love or anger or fear within himself and says, So this is me. Looks at his withered hand or wounded foot and says, So this is me. Looks at the woman he has married or the garden he has planted and says, So this is me. Looks finally upon his enemy and upon his death and says, So this is me. But in saying this he bears witness to the fact that he is also incomparably more than an itemised list of the elements that make up his individuality and its inseparable field of action.

And in acknowledging so much that is a part of ourselves (since our boundaries extend to the furthest horizons we can see from our particular vantage point) we make an act of recognition which actualises what was inherent in us from the start—almost as though we existed only to discover what was always there—recognising our name-tag on everything that comes our way. But the part of us that is our destiny, streaming in upon us in the form of "outside" events through the course of time, can be recognised as belonging to our own particular pattern only when it has happened. The religious man can say, "Thy will be done!" as a statement of his intention to accept this will when it has been done and is apparent to him, but it is not our nature to be able to foresee the future except under the most unusual circumstances. In general, acceptance of destiny is acceptance of what has happened, not of what might happen (but might be prevented).

Islam, which is—in the highest degree—the religion of submission to destiny, is also the religion of Holy War. And there are, for Islam, two aspects to this "Jihad", the "lesser" one being the war against all that makes for disunity and separation in our environment and the "greater" being the war against all that makes for disunity and separation within ourselves. The nature of this war is illuminated by the fact that as soon as the battle—or a particular phase of the battle—is over the outcome, whether victory or defeat, is to be accepted as God's will and as the only means whereby a particular "message" could find expression in human events.

Islam requires that men should fight with all the strength they have against what seems to them evil, hostile or destructive, but that in doing so they should keep always in mind the Quoranic phrase which is heard so constantly in the conversation of Moslems—"But God knows best..." In other words, since it is in the nature of things that we should have some powers of judgment and discrimination, we must use these powers and act upon them, but our action always takes place in the half-light, provisional and liable to correction in terms of a total pattern of which we are unaware. When we fail, it is because success at that particular moment and in that particular context would have been a monstrous thing, contrary to sense and opposed to what we are and always have been beyond our deployment in time.

The stars are in their places. Wind and weather, expressing the nature of the terrestial world, have carved their meaning upon the mountains. And men "who understand" (to use the phrase that occurs again and again in the Qoran) set themselves to read the "signs" that are given them in the natural world and in the events which come upon them, convinced that nothing can be ignored, nothing is irrelevant—not the chance word, not the unexpected encounter, not the fragmentary dream—and that the pattern which is their "Name with God" is being revealed from moment to moment, as though by so many brush strokes (often meaningless if considered singly, but each one essential to the achievement of the final picture).

But the fact that a man's efforts meet with failure can never be taken (as some have supposed) to imply that the effort should never have been made. That this effort should have been made was as necessary to the pattern as was its defeat—or its apparent defeat (since "unsuccessful" action can have a profound influence upon events); nor does the fact that a particular cause may seem to have been totally defeated mean that it was "wrong" and that the cause which triumphed was "right". Our powers of judgment do not extend far enough to assess the ultimate outcome of the efforts we make, and we cannot see the end of their repercussions in the course of time. Indeed, time itself—and our inability to look ahead into the future in the way we look back at the past—is the precondition of our particular kind of freedom as creatures existing here and now, and it is time that makes possible the exercise of viceregal responsibility.

The complaint that such conditional freedom permits no more than the acting out of a play already written and concluded, is like the argument between "free will" and determinism, based upon a confusion of perspectives and of levels. Whatever the doctrinal differences—the differences of statement—between the world's religions, all acknowledge that the future is "known to God", or already inherent within the ultimate matrix of Reality and that, in a certain sense, all that is to happen is already "there". What matters from our point of view is that it is not yet here—and that we are not God. For us it has not yet happened. That is why we exist, our identity fragmented in space and time, and, as the fragments are gathered and the identity put together again, we are actualising here and now something that—in our given condition—we cannot know in any other way.

And because that part of our environment with which we come into contact in the course of our existence is itself an aspect of our ultimate identity, it can be said that the Viceroy's real field of action is always himself and that the only battle he fights is in Moslem terms—the "Greater Holy War", which is the battle for self-unification. But, because we are what we are, the actual distinction between "subjective" and "objective" remains a fact of experience and provides the framework within which we operate. And it is perfectly possible to operate in terms of this distinction without imagining that it has any validity beyond our particular locality.

What matters, perhaps, is the awareness that the conditions which govern this cockpit of ours are indeed local and relative and that we ourselves have a dual nature, at once subject to these conditions in out daily lives (through our mentality, our emotions and our senses) and at the same time transcending them at another level of our being. This awareness, although it took so many different forms and was often implicit rather than expressed, was once universal. Its loss has made invalids of us.

The people of other times knew suffering as we do and, so far as the limits of recorded history go, may have known more of it. But they did not have our acquaintance with meaningless suffering and its partner, despair, which adds an entirely new dimension to pain and misfortune. And if many of them accepted their destiny as something imposed by the nature of things rather than as an aspect of their own identity in the course of actualisation, their acceptance had its roots nonetheless in a traditional wisdom which gave purpose and meaning to acceptance. What are for us abstractions (or fairy tales) were, for them, realities. They could do without the luxuries which we need to make our wretchedness momentarily tolerable.

And in the context of a world that made sense, a sense that was bound to evaporate as soon as men no longer incorporated it in their daily lives and in all that they touched or had to do with, the viceregal function lay at the heart of all other human functions. If the world has changed, this only reflects the change in the idea we now have of our place in it. When the Viceroy lets go of the reins, all things run wild.