Spencer Heath Archive

Item 118

Pencil by Heath on notepad paper.

No date

 

 

 

TO MYSELF

Mr. Editor:

 

     Are you alive to the world tensions of today?

 

     Do you despair of the future or have you some vague and pallid hope?

 

The Dilemma of Modern Man

     In the great Renaissance the spirit of man woke from its bonds of a thousand years into a new dream of beauty and of potential glory in its present world.

      In the heart a new faith burgeoned — a new faith in God,

in God the Universal — not withdrawn as in Sinai alone, but still in-dwelling as at creation’s dawn when His all-inclusive Spirit entered into and constituted man as Man, the potentially divine.

      Under this new awakening the Divinity in man sprang forth in works of eternal grace and loveliness. New faith in beauty inspired search and seeking. It sent the minds of men on voyages of discovery, into new worlds of the divine creation, to learn the mind of God in the worlds and works of God from the very great to the very small. In this a new kind of thinking was achieved. Not didactic out of literal traditions and frozen dogmas, but divine thinking; for it reflected the rationality of God as discovered in the rationale of His divine creation. Men were inspired to create not only by intuition as in the arts, but also to understand, to learn the rationale of God’s creation, the kind of knowledge that is communicable; that, as science, all men can learn; that, as rational technologies, all can employ with God in his never ending creation of order and beauty in His living world.

      All this was started and extended through the new discovery and understanding of the rational processes implicit in the natural world, the environment of man. But not by that understanding alone. For the discoveries in science, like the creations of art, sprang from individual, often solitary, minds with but little communication and even less cooperation in their respective fields. The creative technology depended on widespread cooperation among men. It required fine specializations of labor and the multiplication of differentiated crafts and skills and of technical materials and facilities, all capable of unitary interfunctioning by cooperation, through practice of the Golden Rule of mutual service by contract without coercion in nation-wide and even world-wide trade and exchange.

      Upon this universal cooperation, scarcely conscious, yet benign and divine in its effects, rests the civilization of the modern Western world with all its potentials of leisure and energy for cultural achievement as yet but dimly dreamed.

      Then why is there a seeming impasse, a modern dilemma?

      We have pursued thus far only the divine thread in history, the thread that by its creative nature, its spiritual power, is destined to lead mankind far out of its eons and ages of mere creaturehood into the endless ages of its divinity through practice of its spiritual, its contractually cooperative and creative power.

      Nothing has been said of politics, of governments, of principalities and powers, their superficial cultures, their slaveries and wars; nor of unregenerate man self-bound to these by his sub-human limitations until such as survive destruction by grace of good fortune and achieve the divinely rational procedures and understandings shall draw all men into creative dominion over all their material world.

      The Renaissance man learned the key to the divine rationale, the mind of God as manifested in his physical and his non-human world. He laid the foundations for rational technologies of things. But the effectuation of these technologies to create a material civilization he left to the purely empirical growth and development of non-violent and non-compulsive relationships among men. The Golden Rule of non-violence was to him, as to his age, a subjective, a metaphysical precept.

      The ancient political world that culminated and collapsed in Rome

 

      The United Nations of the ancient world — united into Rome and in the Pax Romana, Peace of Rome, had gone down with the civilization it taxed away. As early as the fifth century the political process had exhausted itself and no great sovereignty remained. The political man gave way to the nomadic, to the tribal man from whom sprung again proprietary communities as in Saxon England