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Chapter 7: The Chapter 7: Primacy
of the Logos over the Ethos
The liturgy
exhibits one peculiarity which strikes as very odd those natures in
particular which are generously endowed with moral energy and
earnestness--and that is its singular attitude towards the moral order.
People of the type instanced above chiefly regret one thing in the
liturgy, that its moral system has few direct relations with everyday
life. It does not offer any easily transposable motives, or ideas
realizable at first hand, for the benefit of our daily conflicts and
struggles. A certain isolation, a certain remoteness from actual life
characterize it; it is celebrated in the somewhat sequestered sphere of
spiritual things. A contrast exists between the study, the factory, and
the laboratory of to-day, between the arena of public and social life
and the Holy Places of solemn, divine worship, between the intensely
practical tendency of our time, which is opposed to life by its wholly
material force and acrid harshness, and the lofty, measured domain of
liturgical conceptions and determination, with its clearness and
elevation of form.
From this it follows that we cannot directly translate into action that
which the liturgy offers us. There will always be a constant need, then,
for methods of devotion which have their origin in a close connection
with modern life, and for the popular devotions by which the Church
meets the special demands and requirements of actual existence, and
which, since they directly affect the soul, are immediately productive
of practical results.1 The liturgy, on the contrary, is primarily
occupied in forming the fundamental Christian temper. By it man is to be
induced to determine correctly his essential relation to God, and to put
himself right in regard to reverence for God, love and faith, atonement
and the desire for sacrifice. As a result of this spiritual disposition,
it follows that when action is required of him he will do what is right.
The question, however, goes yet deeper. What is the position of the
liturgy generally to the moral order? What is the quality of the
relation in it of the will to knowledge, as of the value of truth to the
value of goodness? Or, to put it in two words, what is the relation in
it of the Logos to the Ethos? It will be necessary to go back somewhat
in order to find the answer.
It is safe to affirm that the Middle Ages, in philosophy at least,
answered the question as to the relation between these two fundamental
principles by decisively ranking knowledge before will and the activity
attendant upon the functioning of the latter. They gave the Logos
precedence over the Ethos. That is proved by the way in which certain
frequently discussed questions are answered,2 and by the absolute
priority which was assigned to the contemplative life over the active3;
this stands out as the fundamental attitude of the Middle Ages, which
took the Hereafter as the constant and exclusive goal of all earthly
striving.
Modern times brought about a great change. The great objective
institutions of the Middle Ages--class solidarity, the municipalities,
the Empire--broke up. The power of the Church was no longer, as
formerly, absolute and temporal. In every direction individualism became
more strongly pronounced and independent. This development was chiefly
responsible for the growth of scientific criticism, and in a special
manner the criticism of knowledge itself. The inquiry into the essence
of knowledge, which formally followed a constructive method, now
assumes, as a result of the profound spiritual changes which have taken
place, its characteristic critical form. Knowledge itself becomes
questionable, and as a result the center of gravity and the fulcrum of
the spiritual life gradually shifts from knowledge to the will. The
actions of the independent individual become increasingly important. In
this way active life forces its way before the contemplative, the will
before knowledge.
Even in science, which after all is essentially dependent upon
knowledge, a peculiar significance is assigned to the will. In place of
the former penetration of guaranteed truth, of tranquil assimilation and
discussion, there now develops a restless investigation of obscure,
questionable truth. Instead of explanation and assimilation, education
tends increasingly towards independent investigation. The entire
scientific sphere exhibits an enterprising and aggressive tendency. It
develops into a powerful, restlessly productive, laboring community.
This importance of the will has been scientifically formulated in the
most conclusive manner by Kant. He recognized, side by side with the
order of perception, of the world of things, in which the understanding
alone is competent, the order of practicality, of freedom, in which the
will functions. Arising out of the postulations of the will he admits
the growth of a third order, the order of faith, as opposed to
knowledge, the world of God and the soul. While the understanding is of
itself incapable of asserting anything on these latter matters, because
it is unable to verify them by the senses, it receives belief in their
reality, and thus the final shaping of its conception of the world, from
the postulations of the will which cannot exist and function without
these highest data from which to proceed. This established the "primacy
of the will." The will, together with the scale of moral values peculiar
to it, has taken precedence of knowledge with its corresponding scale of
values; the Ethos has obtained the primacy over the Logos.
The ice having been broken, there now follows the entire course of
philosophic development which sets, in the place of the pure will
logically conceived by Kant, the psychological will, constituting the
latter the unique rule of life--a development due to Fichte,
Schopenhauer, and von Hartmann--until it finds its clearest expression
in Nietzsche. He proclaims the "will to power." For him, truth is that
which makes life sound and noble, leading humanity further towards the
goal of the "Superman."
Such is the origin of pragmatism, by which truth is no longer viewed as
an independent value in the case of a conception of the universe or in
spiritual matters, but as the expression of the fact that a principle or
a system benefits life and actual affairs, and elevates the character
and stability of the will.4 Truth is fundamentally, if not
entirely--though here we overstep the field marked out for our
consideration--a moral, though hardly a vital fact.
This predominance of the will and of the idea of its value gives the
present day its peculiar character. It is the reason for its restless
pressing forward, the stringent limiting of its hours of labor, the
precipitancy of its enjoyment; hence, too, the worship of success, of
strength, of action; hence the striving after power, and generally the
exaggerated opinion of the value of time, and the compulsion to exhaust
oneself by activity till the end. This is the reason, too, why spiritual
organizations such as the old contemplative orders, which formerly were
automatically accepted by spiritual life everywhere and which were the
darlings of the orthodox world, are not infrequently misunderstood even
by Catholics, and have to be defended by their friends against the
reproach of idle trifling. And if it is true that this attitude of mind
has already become firmly established in Europe, whose culture is rooted
in the distant past, it is doubly true where the New World is concerned.
There it comes to light unconcealed and unalloyed. The practical will is
everywhere the decisive factor, and the Ethos has complete precedence
over the Logos, the active side of life over the contemplative.
What is the position of Catholicism in relation to this development? It
must be premised that the best elements of every period and of every
type of mind can and will find their fulfillment in this Religion, which
is truly capable of being all things to all men. So it has been possible
to adapt the tremendous development of power during the last five
centuries in Catholic life, and to summon ever fresh aspects from its
inexhaustible store. A long investigation would be needed if we were to
point out how many highly valuable personalities, tendencies, activities
and views have been called forth from Catholic life as a result of this
responsiveness to the needs of all ages. But it must be pointed out that
an extensive, biased, and lasting predominance of the will over
knowledge is profoundly at variance with the Catholic spirit.
Protestantism presents, in its various forms, ranging from the strong
tendency to the extreme of free speculation, the more or less Christian
version of this spirit, and Kant has rightly been called its
philosopher. It is a spirit which has step by step abandoned objective
religious truth, and has increasingly tended to make conviction a matter
of personal judgment, feeling, and experience. In this way truth has
fallen from the objective plane to the level of a relative and
fluctuating value. As a result, the will has been obliged to assume the
leadership. When the believer no longer possesses any fundamental
principles, but only an experience of faith as it affects him
personally, the one solid and recognizable fact is no longer a body of
dogma which can be handed on in tradition, but the right action as a
proof of the right spirit. In this connection there can be no talk of
spiritual metaphysics in the real sense of the word. And when knowledge
has nothing ultimately to seek in the Above, the roots of the will and
of feeling are in their turn loosened from their adherence to knowledge.
The relation with the super-temporal and eternal order is thereby
broken. The believer no longer stands in eternity, but in time, and
eternity is merely connected with time through the medium of conviction,
but not in a direct manner. Religion becomes increasingly turned towards
the world, and cheerfully secular. It develops more and more into a
consecration of temporal human existence in its various aspects, into a
sanctification of earthly activity, of vocational labor, of communal and
family life, and so on.
Everyone, however, who has debated these matters at any considerable
length clearly perceives the unwholesomeness of such a conception of
spiritual life, and the flagrance of its contradiction of all
fundamental spiritual principles. It is untrue, and therefore contrary
to Nature in the deepest sense of the word. Here is the real source of
the terrible misery of our day. It has perverted the sacred order of
Nature. It was Goethe who really shook the latter when he made the
doubting Faust write, not "In the beginning was the Word," but "In the
beginning was the Deed."
While life's center of gravity was shifting from the Logos to the Ethos,
life itself was growing increasingly unrestrained. Man's will was
required to be responsible for him. Only one Will can do this, and that
is creative in the absolute sense of the word, i.e., it is the Divine
Will.5 Man, then, was endowed with a quality which presumes that he is
God. And since he is not, he develops a spiritual cramp, a kind of weak
fit of violence, which takes effect often in a tragic, and sometimes (in
the case of lesser minds) even a ludicrous manner. This presumption is
guilty of having put modern man into the position of a blind person
groping his way in the dark, because the fundamental force upon which it
has based life--the will-is blind. The will can function and produce,
but cannot see. From this is derived the restlessness which nowhere
finds tranquillity. Nothing is left, nothing stands firm, everything
alters, life is in continual flux; it is a constant struggle, search,
and wandering.
Catholicism opposes this attitude with all its strength. The Church
forgives everything more readily than an attack on truth. She knows that
if a man falls, but leaves truth unimpaired, he will find his way back
again. But if he attacks the vital principle, then the sacred order of
life is demolished. Moreover, the Church has constantly viewed with the
deepest distrust every ethical conception of truth and of dogma. Any
attempt to base the truth of a dogma merely on its practical value is
essentially unCatholic.6 The Church represents truth--dogma--as an
absolute fact, based upon itself, independent of all confirmation from
the moral or even from the practical sphere. Truth is truth because it
is truth. The attitude of the will to it, and its action towards it, is
of itself a matter of indifference to truth. The will is not required to
prove truth, nor is the latter obliged to give an account of itself to
the will, but the will has to acknowledge itself as perfectly
incompetent before truth. It does not create the latter, but it finds
it. The will has to admit that it is blind and needs the light, the
leadership, and the organizing formative power of truth. It must admit
as a fundamental principle the primacy of knowledge over the will, of
the Logos over the Ethos.7
This "primacy" has been misunderstood. It is not a question of a
priority of value or of merit. Nor is there any suggestion that
knowledge is more important than action in human life. Still less does a
desire exist to direct people as to the advisability of setting about
their affairs with prayer or with action. The one is just as valuable
and meritorious as the other. It is partly a question of disposition;
the tone of a man's life will accentuate either knowledge or action; and
the one type of disposition is worth as much as the other. The "Primacy"
is far rather a matter of culture--philosophy, and indeed it consists of
the question as to which value in the whole of culture and of human life
the leadership will be assigned, and which therefore will determine the
decisive tendency; it is a precedence of order, therefore, of
leadership, not of merit, significance, or even of frequency.
But if we concern ourselves further with the question, the idea occurs
that the conception of the Primacy of the Logos over the Ethos could not
be the final one. Perhaps it should be put thus: in life as a whole,
precedence does not belong to action, but to existence. What ultimately
matters is not activity, but development. The roots of and the
perfection of everything lie, not in time, but in eternity. Finally, not
the moral, but the metaphysical conception of the world is binding, not
the worth-judgment, but the import-judgment, not struggle, but worship.
These trains of thought, however, trespass beyond the limits of this
little book. The further question--if a final precedence must not be
allotted to love seems to be linked with a different chain of thought.
Its solution perhaps lies within the possibilities we have already
discussed. When one knows, for instance, that for a time truth is the
decisive standard, it is still not quite established whether truth
insists upon love or upon frigid majesty; the Ethos can be an obligation
of the law, as with Kant, or the obligation of creative love. And even
face to face with existence it is still an open question whether this
obligation is a final rigid inevitability, or if it is love transcending
all measure, in which the impossible itself becomes possible, to which
hope can appeal against all hope. That is what is meant by the question
whether love is not the greatest of these. Indeed, it is.
Nothing less than this was announced by the "good tidings."
In this sense, too, as far as the primacy of truth--but "truth in
love"--is concerned, the present question is to be resolved.
As soon as this is done the foundation of spiritual health is
established. For the soul needs absolutely firm ground on which to
stand. It needs a support by which it can raise itself, a sure external
point beyond itself, and that can only be supplied by truth. The
knowledge of pure truth is the fundamental factor of spiritual
emancipation. "The truth shall make you free."8 The soul needs that
spiritual relaxation in which the convulsions of the will are stilled,
the restlessness of struggle quietened, and the shrieking of desire
silenced; and that is fundamentally and primarily the act of intention
by which thought perceives truth, and the spirit is silent before its
splendid majesty.
In dogma, the fact of absolute truth, inflexible and eternal, entirely
independent of a basis of practicality, we possess something which is
inexpressibly great. When the soul becomes aware of it, it is overcome
by a sensation as of having touched the mystic guarantee of universal
sanity; it perceives dogma as the guardian of all existence, actually
and really the rock upon which the universe rests. "In the beginning was
the Word"--the Logos....
For this reason the basis of all genuine and healthy life is a
contemplative one. No matter how great the energy of the volition and
action and striving may be, it must rest on the tranquil contemplation
of eternal, unchangeable truth. This attitude is rooted in eternity. It
is peaceful, it has that interior restraint which is a victory over
life.
It is not in a hurry, but has time. It can afford to wait and to
develop.
This spiritual attitude is really Catholic. And if it is also a fact, as
some maintain, that Catholicism is in many aspects, as compared with the
other denominations, "backward," by all means let it be. Catholicism
could not join in the furious pursuit of the unchained will, torn from
its fixed and eternal order. But it has in exchange preserved something
that is irreplaceably precious, for which, if it were to recognize it,
the non-Catholic spiritual world would willingly exchange all that it
has; and this is the primacy of the Logos over the Ethos, and by this,
harmony with the established and immutable laws of all existence.
Although as yet the liturgy has not been specifically mentioned,
everything which has been said applies to it. In the liturgy the Logos
has been assigned its fitting precedence over the will.9 Hence the
wonderful power of relaxation proper to the liturgy, and its deep
reposefulness. Hence its apparent consummation entirely in the
contemplation, adoration and glorification of Divine Truth. This is also
the explanation of the fact that the liturgy is apparently so little
disturbed by the petty troubles and needs of everyday life. It also
accounts for the comparative rareness of its attempts at direct teaching
and direct inculcation of virtue. The liturgy has something in itself
reminiscent of the stars, of their eternally fixed and even course, of
their inflexible order, of their profound silence, and of the infinite
space in which they are poised. It is only in appearance, however, that
the liturgy is so detached and untroubled by the actions and strivings
and moral position of men. For in reality it knows that those who live
by it will be true and spiritually sound, and at peace to the depths of
their being; and that when they leave its sacred confines to enter life
they will be men of courage.
ENDNOTES
1. Both in this connection and in countless others we find demonstrated
the absolute necessity of the extra-liturgical forms of spiritual
exercise, the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross, popular devotions,
meditation, etc. There could be no greater mistake than the attempt to
build up liturgical life on an exclusively liturgical model. And it is
equally mistaken merely to tolerate the other forms, because the "lower
classes" need them, while setting the liturgy as the only possible
pattern and guide before struggling humanity. Both are necessary. The
one complements the other. Pride of place, however, belongs of course to
the liturgy, because it is the official prayer of the Church.
(Cf. my book, "Der Kreuzweg unseres Hernn und Heilandes," Introduction,
Mainz, 1921)
2. Cf. the discussions on the significance of theology as to whether it
is a "pure" science or one with an aim, that of bettering humanity; upon
the essence of eternal happiness, whether it ultimately consists in the
contemplation of God or in the love of Him; on the dependence of the
will upon knowledge, and so on.
3. It is significant that it was not until the seventeenth century, and
then in the face of universal opposition, that active Orders for women
were founded. The history of the Order of the Visitation is especially
instructive in this connection.
4. This tendency has also influenced Catholic thought. A great deal of
modernistic thought endeavors to make theological truth--dogma-dependent
upon Christian life and to estimate its importance not as a standard of
truth, but as a value in life.
5. Yet even here reason affirms that God is not merely an Absolute Will
but, at the same time, truth and goodness. Revelation seals this, as it
does every form of spiritual perception, by showing us that in the
Blessed Trinity the "first thing" is the begetting of the Son through
the recognition of the Father, and the "second" (according to thought,
of course, not according to time) is the breathing forth of the Holy
Ghost through the love of Both.
6. Here nothing is said, of course, against the endeavor to exhibit the
value of dogma in the abstract, and that of the single dogmatic truth
for life. On the contrary, this can never be done forcibly enough.
7. This is said of knowledge, not of comprehension of the primacy of
knowledge over the practical, of the contemplative over the active life
in the way understood by the Middle Ages, even if it lacks the latter's
cultural-
historical characteristics. On the other hand, it is impossible for us
to free ourselves sufficiently from the domination of pure
comprehension, as it has endured for half a century.
8. John viii. 32.
9. Because it
reposes upon existence, upon the essential, and even upon existence in
love, as I hope to be able to demonstrate
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