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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3106

Mimeographed page fastened with paper clip to a typed letter from Heath, Elkridge, Maryland, dated January 4, 1936, to Paul Limbert, 21 Claremont Avenue, New York City, setting out in seven pages the first draft of what was later revised and titled “The Inspiration of Beauty,” printed in booklet form and eventually published in 1957 as the final chapter in Citadel, Market and Altar.

February, 1936

 

WHAT DYNAMIC RELIGION MEANS TO ME

 

There are in nature and in the vicissitudes of life, besides our failures and defeats, certain experiences, appreciations and achievements that suffuse us with a sense of beauty, power, capacity and well-being. By these things we are, both figuratively and literally inspired. To cherish and to cultivate these in the consciousness is the true spiritual discipline. The inspired mind is the creative mind. It cannot destroy. It is illumined with understanding. The hidden beauties of nature and of human nature are revealed to it. It is at one with God in the joyous putting forth of divine power, for it has entered into the perpetual springtime of infinite creation.

 

Men of this spiritual perception throughout the ages are moved to record and preserve by means of outward ex­pression the elements and experiences from which deep in­spiration has come to them. They employ symbols and devise rituals, all reminiscent of the sources of their inspiration. In the creative arts they rebuild it in color and form, rhythmic motion and melodic sound, and in the magic of poesy, song and story. Through those they preserve and communicate their divine experiences and inspire others with the sense of beauty and creative power. This is the only enduring office of religion and of all the aesthetic arts.

 

Evil exists only by default – only through less than the whole of human energy being expressed in creative form. All fighting against sin, all war against wrong, is but a further perversion of the creative power. Only in the full and free exercise of this power is evil dissolved and overcome. The carrying on of this power is the cosmic pageant of evolving nature. This is the divine business of life, the abiding reality. It is the bringing into being of relationships that endure through becoming the elements of still higher relationships. All others are transitory and must dissolve. It is their impermanence that gives them their character as evil.

 

Any religion that attacks evil is a religion of war. All conflict destroys; its wages is death. Opposition to evil involves cancellation of creative force, of life. Even in the supposed defeat of evil no positive good is achieved. And salvation is only incidental to the real business of life. Life is organic; its technique is growth, creation, achievement of higher relationships. The true and enduring office of religion and of all the arts that have flowered from her is not conflict, not reform, not salvation, not to destroy nor yet to save. It is to inspire. It is to qualify the energy of life with the divine beauty of its creative expression.

 

New York City, February, 1936.                   Spencer Heath

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3106

Letter from Heath, Elkridge, Maryland, to Paul Limbert,

21 Claremont Avenue, New York City

January 4, 1936

 

 

My dear Dr. Limbert:

 

In compliance with your request, I have sketched out some of the ideas that I tried to express at the last meeting of the Graduate Group. I hope you will find in what I have written a paragraph or two that will serve your purpose.

 

I trust you have begun a new year that will be filled with love and happiness and the joy of human service.

 

Cordially and sincerely,

 

     Spencer Heath

 

 

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           What distinguishes human from other beings is that in addition to their animal functions and capacities they are endowed with a higher nervous organization, consciousness and imagination, that gives them creative powers — makes them children of God. These higher powers have brought them forward into a new mode of life and organi­zation in which each member, instead of seeking to serve himself directly and alone, finds his highest self-service indirectly through giving specialized services to others and, by the technique of exchange, enjoying the products and services of others in vast abundance and variety and convenience as to time and circumstance. This creative process, this mighty mutuality and co-operation, when re­leased from the manifold restrictions now imposed upon it, will render the life of each individual essential to the highest existence of every other and magnify each as the servant of all.

 

In the animal mode of existence nature imposes severe

limitations and restrictions. Being without creative powers, their only subsistence is what nature provides, and they can use their subsistence to no other end but to multiply their numbers. Without the social creativeness of men, they cannot command and control the forces and materials of nature and thus multiply their subsistence far beyond anything their increasing numbers can require. So it comes about that in the animal world of scarce and limited subsistence, broadly speaking, the very existence of each individual or group is inimical to every other, and their necessary technique is to restrict and destroy. This practice among men is a heritage from their animal origin. It cannot be adapted to their social-ized state. All social progress, all the sciences and the arts, all creativeness, comes out of the predominance of the distinctively human – the divine – the technique of creation through exchange of services.

 

In the human world evil is atavistic. It is reversion to modes of action no longer adaptive, hence not enduring. It exists only by reason of less than the whole of human energy being expressed in creative form. All re­sistance against evil, all fights against sin, all war against wrong, is but a further perversion of the creative power. It is only in the full and free exercise of this power that evil is dissolved and overcome. The carrying on of this power is the cosmic pageant of evolving nature. This is the divine business of life, the abiding reality. It is the bringing into being of relationships that endure through becoming the elements of still higher relationships. All others are transitory and must dissolve. It is their impermanence that gives them their character as evil.

 

All our prepossession of evil and wrong has to do with the impermanent, the unreal. All opposition to evil, even in the most necessitous situations, involves a further cancellation of creative force without positive gain. Even in the defeat of evil no positive good is achieved. All con­flict destroys. Any religion that seeks to destroy evil is a religion of war. Salvation itself is not an end; it is only incidental to the real business of life. Life is organic; it is manifested only in growth, creation, achievement of higher relationships. The true and enduring office of religion, as of all the aesthetic arts that have flowered from her, is not conflict, not reform, not salvation, not to destroy nor yet to save. It is to inspire. It is to qualify the energy of life with the divine beauty of its creative expression.

 

There are in nature and in the vicissitudes of life, besides failures and defeats, and even beyond ordinary satis­factions, certain experiences, appreciations and achievements that suffuse us with a sense of beauty, power, capacity and well-being. By these things we are figuratively and even literally inspired. To cherish and cultivate these in the consciousness and imagination is the true spiritual discipline, for the inspired mind is the creative mind; it cannot destroy. It is illumined with understanding. The secret beauties of nature and of human nature arc revealed to it. It is at one with God in the joyous putting forth of divine power, for it has entered into the perpetual springtime of infinite creation.

 

Men of this spiritual perception throughout the ages are moved to record and preserve by outward means of expression the elements and experiences from which deep inspiration has come to them. They employ symbols and devise rituals, all re­miniscent of the sources of their inspiration and conveying it to others. In the creative arts they rebuild it in form and color, rhythmic motion and melodic sound, and in the magic of poesy, song and story. Through these they communicate and preserve their divine experiences and inspire others with the sense of wonder and of beauty and creative power. This is the only enduring office of religion and of all the arts.

 

Those persons who yield themselves to the persuasions of beauty are so far exempt from the dumb compulsions of animal life. They are transferred to the positive side of existence where they seek not least pain but highest exaltation. They dream dreams and see visions. That which they love they love not to possess but to be possessed by it. By such as these are the creative elements and modes of action to be distinguished in the social organism as well as in the individual life. By their joyous devotion to vision, the relationships and the in­stitutions of men may be drawn to the pattern of all the loveli­ness that lies prisoned in human nature only to be awakened by beauty to be creative and divine. There can be no service so high as that of the aesthetic in religion and the arts for the building of love and beauty into the institutions and the lives of men.

 

I am sure to be reminded by some vigorous and impatient protester that hunger, suffering and degrading conditions of life close the minds and hearts of great masses of men against the in­fluence of beauty and its inspiration to creative life. I am fully mindful of all this and for that reason I make my appeal primarily to those who are amenable to inspiration. I urge that they teach their minds to distinguish anti-social and destructive activities from those that are social and creative — acts that are truly of service from those that repress and inhibit social co-operation and exchange of services.

 

Those acts of individuals that restrict and restrain others are by common agreement forbidden and punished as crimes. It is to our sanction of violent and destructive activities on the part of government and public authority that I would invite enlightened attention. We should realize and remember that all the authority for anti-social restrictions lies in our silent endorsement of them and it is by our power they are enforced. In our actions through government we have neglected to distinguish between creation and destruction, between acts that assist ex­changes of services and acts that hinder and prohibit them. We have no moral standards for governments as we have for men. It. seems to be our notion that all government is comprised in its regulative, restrictive and corrective activities when, in fact, all this should be but the smallest part of government, concerned only or mainly with crimes. Every law penalizing acts that are not crimes, not anti-social and therefore not malum in se, is in restraint of mutual service and creative activity. Every such law creates unemployment of men and of their instruments of pro­duction and service, with all the sorry evils that follow in its train.

 

But human energy persists, and if restrained from crea­tion must express itself destructively in crime and violence or in individual and social decay. The business cycle, every econo­mic perversion, and the final decay and fall of nations can be distinctly traced to governmental restraints and restrictions. They impoverish and finally destroy the whole society, and during this process the restraints and limitations imposed simulate for men the impoverished condition of the lower animals in nature, where each one is inimical to every other, and men are held down to the same combative relationships and inevitable wars.

 

Societies can advance and endure only through their governments relinquishing their restrictions on societal activities and evolving into agencies of public service. And these must be public services, for any service by government to an individual or to a special group becomes a special privilege and a private service. Public services, therefore, can be rendered to society as such only by being supplied and delivered to its territory through rights of way and other public reservations. These services increase the production of wealth in the territory served, and the portion of this increased production that is offered and given as location rent is the public revenue resulting from the activities of public servants and other publicly created agencies for performing services.

 

All acts of government must be by proxies, officers or agents invested with specific powers and responsibilities. Land owners are the creatures and agents of government whose function it is to collect in the form of location rents the value of the public services in proportion as these services are supplied to each location. It is also their function to use these revenues for the wages of the public servants and to direct and supervise their work. If this supervision is well performed, if the public services are well supervised and administered, the rents created by them must by far exceed the cost of the labor and materials in the public services, and this excess will be the proper and earned compensation to the land owners for their supervisory and adminis­trative services. Such administrators, unlike our present elect­ed ones, would have everything to gain by honesty and efficiency and everything to lose by corruption and waste.

 

The change from government by restrictions and repress­ions to one of public service and assistance in men’s employment of one another and exchange together of their services and pro­ducts will mark a great change in human relationships. The animal technique of warfare and elimination becomes lost in un­restrained creative activity. The very abundance of wealth and service will cancel fear and forbid accumulations and take all the distinction out of individual possessions. What is still more vital, all men now can come under the inspiration and cre­ative influences of religion and all the arts. The requisite conditions are present for an indefinite expansion of spiritual and artistic achievement and of relationships of love and beauty beyond all past or present dreams.

 

 

 

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Final version of “The Inspiration of Beauty” as published in 1957 as the final chapter in Citadel, Market and Altar:

 

 

CHAPTER 30

The Inspiration of Beauty

Human Emergence into the Divine by Creative Artistry

In the natural world great discoveries are made by men who delve into the order of nature and her laws under the inspiration of the beauty that they seek and find. Such labors are esthetic; art and beauty for their own sake, and for no other reward; fruits of the creative spirit of man.

 

 But these spiritual gifts come into the practical service of men only through the operations of production and exchange. The engineers, the technicians, the men of business who buy and sell, must give bodies to these gifts of the spirit and market them to the populace in tangible forms — and for great tangible rewards.

 

 So also is it with nature as she manifests herself in the living so­cieties of men. The working of her laws in the social organization can be discovered only by pursuit of the beauty that in them lies. This done, practical business alone can embody them in forms of utmost service to man.

 

 What distinguishes human from other beings is that they are en­dowed with a spiritual and creative power that gives them dominion over the whole earth and makes them the “children of God.” This power has lifted them into a new mode of life, a social organization, in which each member finds his enrichment indirectly through specialized service to others and, by a system of measured exchanges called business or trade, enjoys the products and services of others in vast variety, convenience and abundance. The growth of this mighty mutuality of service is the divine pathway to that transcendent state, visioned in poets’ dreams, in which the highest being is attained through each becoming, in effect, the servant of all.

 

 In their un-social-ized state, nature lays heavy restrictions alike upon animals and men. Without the power to create and exchange, their subsistence is only what nature provides, and this they cannot employ to rebuild their world but only to multiply their kind. They cannot bend the forces of nature to their needs and desires. But social-ized men, by their technique of trade and exchange, can raise their subsistence to vastly higher levels than their increasing numbers can require. So it comes about that in the animal and un-social-ized world, even the existence of an individual or group is inimical to every other, and the necessary technique is to seize, violate and de­stroy. This crude relationship among men is the heritage of their animal past. All creativeness, all the sciences and arts, all social cul­ture and growth, is the product of the distinctively human — the divine — technique of creation through exchange of service. However little we are aware of it, this is the divine symbiosis, the living with God through living divinely with men.

 

 Evil is atavistic, reversion to actions no longer adaptive, and hence not enduring. When the sum total of human energy shall flow out­ward in functional and creative modes, then evil can no longer exist. All activity either for or against evil is creative energy misdirected, perverted and lost. But the putting out of the divine, the creative, power transcends all evil, resolving it into the beauty of the divine. This is the cosmic pageant of evolving nature, for only the positive can prevail, only the creative can abide. It brings into being relation­ships that endure through being synthesized into higher relationships. It is the divine business of universal life, the abiding reality. The character of evil, as such, lies in its impermanence.

 

 Salvation from evil is not any advance but only a salvage at the best, for it does not enter into the progression of the divine. Life manifests itself in creation by growth into higher relationships. Its real business is to flow forward in forms transcending all its past. The enduring office of religion and of all the esthetic arts she has nurtured and brought forth is not to destroy nor yet to save. It is to inspire. It is to qualify the crude energy of life with the divine beauty of its creative expression.

 

 Amid the vicissitudes of life, and above all merely negative gratifi­cation or relief, there are relationships, receptivities and appreciations that suffuse with a sense of unity, integrity and creative power. This is the sensing of beauty, the veritable inspiration, the authentic reve­lation of the truly divine. It is expressed outwardly in the uplifted eyes, the parted lips, the inward breath, the outstretched arms, the heightened muscular tone and the sense of being fully alive. Its recipient is at once, and for the moment, however brief, perfect and whole, a “child of God” in whom there is no guile. To cherish and cultivate this receptivity is the true “spiritual discipline,” for the in­spired mind cannot destroy; it is the seer, it is illumined, it alone understands. The deep and secret beauties and potencies of nature and of human nature are revealed to it. It is “at one with God” in the joyous putting forth of divine power, for it has emerged into the perpetual springtime of infinite creation.

 

 In every age, so far as men have practiced the golden rule of service by mutual exchange, the creative “power of God” has blessed them with a measure of freedom; and with freedom, abundance; and with abundance, peace and length of days. The energies so liberated from conflict and wars on wings of inspiration divinely rise, not in flight from death, but in an eternal seeking after light and life. Touched by this esthetic perception, the children of men’s lifted vision spring from their hearts and hands as works of art, evangels of the Universal Beauty whose mark and sign they bear. Under this inspiration men create objects as symbols, devise actions as ritual, weave words into melody, and sounds into symphony and song. Thus through the esthetic arts do they worship and commune with Beauty, and by their works pay homage to this, their Source divine. As its inspira­tion descends they clothe it in color and form, in rhythmic motion and melodic sound, and in the magic of story, poesy and song. These rouse the sense of wonder and awe, feed the awakened aspirations and release in ecstasies the potential powers of man. Thus through the esthetic arts does religion speak and move, and in ever-flowing concord bind men’s hearts to creative Beauty — to the divine.

 

 Yet more: awakened and uplifted eyes trace out heavenly beauty, and the swinging constellations make music in the rational and reflective mind of man. The world is traversed in its breadth, its summits scaled, its depths explored, its history revealed; and there also man finds order and process native to his emancipated mind. In the joy of this new light he learns the sure way of knowing and of doing that is called science, and by its employment widens all his limitations of space and time. The vision of the intellect, of the eye of the mind, gives the hand of man its grasp upon eternal power — the power wherewith to mold to heart’s desire his physical and, no less, his social and therewith his spiritual world.

 

 Those who respond to the persuasions of beauty are, so far, ex­empt from the rude compulsions of animal life. They enter the posi­tive phase of existence where they strive not for less pain but for highest exaltation — where they love not possession but to be pos­sessed. Such persons alone can clearly distinguish the integrative and creative modes of action either in the social organism or in the in­dividual life. The ecstatic vision alone can limn to seekers and seers the patterns of living beauty that lie in the social institutions of men no less than in their essential selves. Transcending all expedience and quickening creative power, is the inspiration — the very spirit of re­ligion — that consecrates the esthetic and the abstract arts and endows with visions that transform the world.

 

 The uninspired will protest that degrading conditions of life dim the minds and dull the hearts of men against creative inspiration, casting down the weak and rousing in the strong a wrathful fury to destroy. But the appeal of the spirit is not to victims nor is it to avengers. It is to those unpretending servants and redeemers of man­kind who thrill to the rationally understandable beauty that inheres in all the life-ward ways of peace, however mean or commonplace they seem. For they, of all men, are sufficiently detached from the rigors of mere animal existence and from the sweet seductions of organized brute force to discern the creative harmonies in free human relationships no less than in the singing of the stars.

 When private persons put others under compulsion of force or deceit and thus get without giving, such actions are forbidden and punished as crimes. But precisely similar acts, systematized under governmental power, we morally approve and applaud or blindly accept and endure. Men acting as government, supposedly as servants of all, have no code of pro-social conduct such as there is for plain and private men, for those who are limited to the voluntary relationships of consent and exchange. We have not apprehended the divine beauty, the golden-rule character, the spiritual quality of the exchange process and so have scarcely yet dreamed of its potentiality, its awaiting beneficence, when extended into those ter­ritorial or community services that men must have not separately but in common and that are essential to community life.

 

 And so in our blindness to the beauty of the voluntary relation­ships of contract and exchange, in which our creative and thus our spiritual power dwells, we have all too little enjoyed the blessings of this divine technology in the production and distribution of com­munity services and goods. The miracle of social organization lately evolved out of ancient tyranny is the highest form of organic life; but it is very young, hardly adolescent, not yet sufficiently evolved.

 

 The modern free society employing the process of contract and exchange took over from the ruling classes, from the governments of ancient and medieval times, agriculture and most of the services then performed by serfs and tax-ridden “free” men under domina­tion of their ruling powers. Only a century or so ago it separated the administration of land, of community sites and resources, out of the power of government by bringing this basic property under the noncoercive jurisdiction of ownership or possession determined by free contracts sanctioned by common consent. But society has not yet so far evolved as to bring within this non-coercive administration the providing of general community services (other than the mere dis­tribution of them) which are appurtenant to the sites and lands and available to the public only through its occupancy or use of them. Under this evolutionary lag, ancient political power now so moves forward as to threaten complete reversion to the slave technique. In this adventure, mountainous public debt mortgages future pro­duction to past dissipation while advancing seizures of property and curtailments of freedom prevent the productive employment of lands, of capital and of men. Thus stalks the warning shadow of a com­pletely political or “socialized” society which, of course, would be no society at all.

 

 All of the social and spiritual energies of men spring from their divine sublimation of otherwise destructive and undifferentiated brute force. This energy cannot be destroyed. When blocked in its creative flow, it finds expression in public and private violence and crime. Every social perversion, every business depression and the downward trend of production and exchange that marks the social decline, can be traced to cumulative repressions of the social process by political authority. This dries the very springs of public revenue, bankrupts the productive economy and destroys all the values that society creates. Yet a higher public technology waits, and it must evolve. Just as the whole organization of private enterprise can serve its myriad customers with no need to enslave them, so must society evolve the like system of public enterprise through the organization of community owners to provide common services to their habitants without ruling or enslaving them.

 

 Public services are those conferred publicly on a territory through portions set apart as rights of way for communication and for other common purposes or needs. These services enable wealth to be pro­duced and exchanged within the territory served. The portion of this wealth that by contract and consent of all is rendered up to the territorial owners as location rent is the public revenue given in exchange for the owners’ services in making contractual and thereby peaceable and productive allocations of the varying advantages ap­pertaining to the sites and resources. This includes any balance of services above the dis-services of the political regime — if such balance there be. And as in all other transactions in which property or its use is transferred, the market is the real arbiter of the terms. For the free market, by its consensus of many minds, gauges the recompense according to the social advantages of contract above the alternative of political administration by force. And in this it is governed by all the circumstances as to present demand and the alternatives available, and not merely by the physical properties or advantages possessed by the property rented or sold.

 

 Society can do no act otherwise than through its public officers. The owners of the land are officers of society established by custom and consent and constituting the membership of its basic institution, property in land. The functioning of this institution provides the society with the vital service of a contractual allocation of its sites and resources with security of possession on equal terms for all. For per­forming this necessary service of merchandising socially, by free con­tracts and without coercion or discrimination, the society voluntarily awards to these proprietary officers a recompense out of its resulting productivity that is called land value or ground rent. Like the owners of a lesser community such as a hotel, it is also their function, as yet undiscovered and unperformed, to supervise their community services, protect their tenants against violence at the hands of the community servants and to meet the costs of the public business out of the enormous revenues thus to be created and freely obtained. For the public business when so administered will yield rents far exceed­ing all present rents and present taxation combined, and the high revenues remaining above all other costs will be the earned recom­pense of the owners for their administrative services. Unlike mere elected officials, such owner-administrators will have everything to lose by force or fraud or any inhibitions of the social process and everything to gain, in fortune and in honors, by their fruitful and efficient administration of the public affairs in the communities they own.

 

 The social-ization of government into a contractual agency of public services, by transforming the present practice of seizures, compulsions and restraints into one of protection and assistance to men’s employment of and services to many others through their voluntary relations, will result in almost unimaginable improvement in the material and the spiritual condition of mankind. The abun­dance of goods can be like that of light and air, and the energy that now wastes in strife and war can flow into creative services and sublimest artistries. Fear and hate will be transformed, under in­spiration, into the ministrations of love. Through loyalty and de­votion to Beauty, men will find abundance and peace, and even those who sought only security and ease will awaken, God-like, in the liberty of free spirits to the majesty of creative labor and to the grandeur and the glory of the Cosmic Dream.