Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1676.

Carbon of a letter from Heath to George C.S. Benson, President, Claremont Men’s College, Claremont, California.

September 30, 1959

Dear Dr. Benson:

     Returning from a visit to the Virginias and the South, I was happy to find your kind letter proposing a series of discussions with you and your four associate members of the Institute for Studies in Federalism during February in the coming year. For that month or even earlier dates made in advance will be entirely convenient for me. My present expectations are to leave here by air early in November and, after some stop-overs en route, to arrive in California about November 20th. I will wait for your confirmation of specific dates.

     Your proposal is very appealing to me, for I am hoping that we can widen the Classical concept of federalism, as the insuring of “good faith” among a number of sovereign corporate entities exercising a political jurisdiction, so as to include the joint undertakings of proprietary organizations with respect to services that are common and general throughout their respective communities. This “good faith” (federe) is of course essential in either case; in the one for the true observance of covenants — agreements of non-aggression, express or implied — and in the other for the faithful performance of contracts which are not negative and thus can be and nearly always are fully performed. The vice or virtue of federalism would seem to depend on the nature, on the ultima res or subject-matter of the compact or agreement — whether it is the accepting and respecting of a status or the performing of actions that lead to mutual advance.

     I should have been happy had you proposed to discuss these principles in a general way, apart from the interest of any single author or publication. I am thus and therefore all the more gratified that you propose my Citadel, Market and Altar as pointing up four different aspects or approaches. The first, I would suggest, is that of the natural scientist whose methods of research and discovery have revealed so much and have been so marvelous in their results. The second could be that of the humanist and historian, whose allegiance to values and recordings of achievement afford rich vantage-ground for ever higher adventurings in the realms of spirit and mind. The third approach would be that of the man of business who, though but dimly knowing it and for golden gain, brings to the practical use and services of millions of men what can be first seen and dreamed by only a gifted few. A fourth approach may well be that of philosophy and art, of sages and singers who aspire to the universal, whose systems and precepts, signs and symbols, give intimations of immortality and waken the divine.

     For your convenience and that of the Institute members, four copies of Citadel, Market and Altar went forward to you yesterday by post prepaid.

     I look forward to the pleasure of visiting you again and of meeting your associates in a common seeking of the knowledge that gives power — of deeper understandings of the human heritage and all that it implies.

     With cordial good wishes to you and also to Mr. Payne,

Sincerely yours,

 

SM/m

Enc:  Christian Doctrine of Man