02 FAITH

I sing the progresse of a deathlesse soule,

Whom Fate, which God made, but doth not controule,

Plac’d in most shapes;. . .

—John Donne, Metempsychosis

There may be some, I suppose, who will say, Why, these limitations you have been talking about, these imperfections and contradictions in the nature and situation of the human individual—these are merely expressions of “original sin,” of the ineradicable taint imposed upon all future humanity by the disobedience of Adam and Eve in their tasting of the forbidden fruit that offered the knowledge of good and evil.

This is a thesis I cannot accept. Whatever else might be attributable to original sin, the limitations I have been discussing are not. They consist, for the most part, of the conflict between two sides of man’s nature. One of these he inherited from the animals along with his physiological nature. It was something that had existed long before there was any genus humanum to experience its influence.

The Emergence of the Soul

In the case of the other side—the spiritual side—of his nature, things are of course more complicated. There must have been a crucial time in the development of the human race when men were subject to a change that none of the other animals experienced. The nature of this change is difficult to describe. I can only say that there evidently developed in man at this point a capacity for self-awareness, for self-scrutiny, and for consciousness of the moral qualities of his own behavior, and indeed a certain ability to perceive and to hold in mind the distinctions between right and wrong. None of these qualities were present in the beasts, of which man had been one up to that time. None are present in the beasts today—at least not in any degree comparable to that of the development of man. If the passages in the biblical account about the tree of the knowledge of right and wrong were taken only symbolically and not literally, there might indeed be said to be some connection between the concept of original sin and what I have been discussing. But it would be at best a faint and partial connection. Not for a moment could I concede that the limitations I have pointed to are the expression of some congenital moral delinquency in man’s makeup—a taint imposed upon him in perpetuity by the transgression of remote ancestors. Modern man was not his own creator. What he is, in large part, is what he was created, by the hand of whoever created the physical universe, to be. He cannot change it. He can only make the best of it. And in that effort to make the best of it there lies most of the drama, the tragedy, and the glory of civilized life.

One must not, of course, be too dogmatic about this change in man’s nature and the distinction it created between man and the other animals. It had no neat and clear parameters. It must have been a very gradual change; perhaps in some respects it is still in progress. It certainly affected people in varying degrees and at different times. But its significance was not diminished by this lack of tidy limits. And this significance was overwhelming. It would seem to me to have been the greatest single thing that ever happened to humanity.

And the fact that this change did occur is, to me, extraordinary to the point of mystery. Why to man and to none of the other animals? Here, if anywhere, one senses the intervention of a divine hand. For what was happening was, in effect, the birth of the human soul; and for this I, at any rate, am unable to perceive any purely physiological cause.

This is, perhaps, as good a point as any other for recording my own conviction that the soul has an existence wholly separate from that of the body. It has its seat, of course, in the body—is in one sense the prisoner of the body so long as the latter is alive. But it is not of the same substance as the body. And this being the case, there is no reason why it should share the body’s mortality. Whether it had an existence before the body did; whether it inhabits, over the ages, only a single body; or what becomes of it when the death of the body has deprived it of this particular habitation: these are the mysteries, obviously not for men to solve. But that the soul is something more than the body it inhabits seems to me unchallengeable.

There is a point, at the end of the Russian Orthodox funeral service, when the casket has just been closed and the body is being carried out of the church, where the choir, in one of those magnificent musical passages that are the glory of the Orthodox service, “sings” the immortal soul out of the now lifeless body and frees it for the pursuit of its passage to whatever awaits it in the afterlife. This image rests, in my mind, on a profound insight—an insight derived from the heart and not from the head. I accept it unquestionably.

This is not just a matter of faith. I have seen (and I am surely not alone in this observation) manifestations of love and concern for others on the part of elderly people, themselves sick and near death, for which no conceivable physical processes in the body could have provided the motivation. This same reality becomes evident wherever real, outgoing love for others, self-denying and self-sacrificing, makes itself felt in human affairs. It is clear that man does not, indeed, live by bread alone, or exclusively by those bodily functions and reactions that bread sustains. There is plainly something else there for the existence of which the body alone provides no explanation.

Let this affirmation of belief in the soul’s uniqueness and independence, as something wholly distinct from the physical frame it inhabits, serve as a suitable point of departure for an inquiry, so far as this writer is capable of such a thing, into matters of faith.

A Personal Creed

I regard myself, if anyone wants to know, as a Christian, although there are certainly others who would question my right to that status. Even from the standpoint of the purely secular historian, untouched by any question of his own faith, I would find the appearance of such a figure as Christ on this earth, at the place and the time of which history informs us, a most remarkable occurrence, bordering on the miraculous. The striking nature of his conflict with the Jewish religious establishment of his time; the impressive and startlingly realistic touches in the accounts of his death; the unmistakable profundity of his belief in his own filial relationship to God; and finally, many of the statements imputed to him in the various Gospels—statements destined to affect the lives of large portions of the Western world for some two thousand years into the future: these alone should suffice to persuade the skeptical historian that Christ’s passage across the face of world history was an event of extraordinary significance. But on top of all this, there are the evidences of the profound impression his person seems to have made, quite independently of the various miracles, on people of that day. The Gospels are full of such evidences. They are borne out by the endurance and acceptance of these impressions in the decades immediately following his death. I personally find their most striking reflection in these words of Saint John the Evangelist: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” Nothing in the remainder of the Gospel of Saint John would suggest that these words (aside from giving us, in the King James Version, one of the most beautiful sentences in the English language) were anything other than a faithful description by some serious and observant contemporary (there is much uncertainty about who this really was) of the impression the memory of Jesus was still capable of making on people of a time some forty years after his death.

But it is not on any of those observations that my own religious feeling is based. Nor should it have been. Christ himself would have been the first to maintain, I suspect, that calculations of that sort were wholly inadequate to any serious religious conviction. What he asked for was faith; and I am glad to give it: faith in the man himself, as Christ’s image has come down to us in the understanding, perhaps even in the creative intuition and imagination, of people of later ages—faith in the silent suffering Christ who, when Herod questioned him, “answered him nothing”; faith in the equally silent Christ who, in the imagination of Dostoyevski, responded by a kiss of forgiveness to the vainglorious and cynical visions of the Great Inquisitor; faith in the Christ whose own faith was so real and so human that he could find, in his agony, no other final words than a call for forgiveness for his executioners and torturers (“for they know not what they do”) and, at last, the desperate and oh-so-human words “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

For the belief in this man I need, then, no historical evidence or explication. Faith suffices. But does this faith make me a good Christian? Many, I suspect, would deny that it does. For I have great difficulty in reconciling the figure of the almighty God, the presumed creator of our universe, with that of the supposedly loving and benevolent God to whom we are taught to pray. This latter God was presented to us, after all, as a compassionate one, aware of our problems, concerned for our success in meeting them, prepared to help us to the extent that we were prepared to accept his help. But how would this image fit with the all-powerful God who, if he was truly the creator of our world, must have included in his creation, along with the phenomenon man, the very handicaps—the fractured state and the tragic burdens—with which, as we have seen, that phenomenon is so sorely encumbered?

I can make this point clearer, perhaps, by explaining that I can perceive, on the map of my cosmology, two discrete and quite dissimilar features, between which I can find no unity.

The Primary Cause

One of these features is what I might call the Primary Cause of the universe. It is this, as I see it, that brought into being the universe we partially know, with all those qualities the scientists are beginning to recognize in it. Such image as we are able to form of this universe is incomplete, and can, of course, never be otherwise. However persistently we pursue it, it inevitably recedes at some point into the unfathomable recesses of infinity—infinity in time or space or (since they may be the same thing) both. These recesses defy not only our knowledge and our powers of comprehension but even our powers of conception, of imagination, and of language. And any view of the origin of the universe consists, for this reason, not of any definable or imaginable object but rather of an assumption—the assumption of the existence of something we cannot see, will never see, and were presumably never meant to see.

It was this Primary Cause, one must suppose, that not only created the Big Bang or whatever it was that brought the universe into existence but also created whatever caused that, and so, farther and farther back, as far as you will, as far as imagination stretches, into the forbidden and impenetrable recesses of infinity to which I have just referred.

Now, whatever else may be said about this Primary Cause, I am most reluctant to believe that it, in fashioning this universe and subjecting it to the rather relentless laws by which its further development seems to have been governed, was greatly concerned about the well-being of so infinitesimally tiny, remote, and transitory a feature of it as the passage across the face of one of its multitudes of planets, at a time some untold trillions of years then in the future, of a curious animal species known to itself as mankind. What we know of the process by which the universe has developed suggests to me nothing whatsoever in the nature of such a concern on the part of its creator. It suggests rather, so far as we are concerned, the prevalence on that creator’s part of a supreme and very natural indifference. The Primary Cause must, after all, have had a great many other things to think about. There was at that time, or so we must suppose, nothing remotely resembling a human being for the Primary Cause to have in mind.1

Even less plausible is the suggestion that this Primary Cause, having created such an order and laid down the laws of its development, should, in response to the prayers of creatures such as ourselves, interfere currently, on a day-to-day basis, and in greatest detail, in the working of those laws, thus vitiating the very concept that lay behind them. There are other ways, and other agencies, by which certain kinds of human prayers can, in my view, be responded to; and to these we shall turn shortly. But we must concede to the Primary Cause a greater seriousness, and a greater consistency of design and execution, than would be compatible with the suggestion that all of the multitudinous details of our lives are subject, day by day, to its benevolent attention, and are shaped individually, without reference to the rest of the grand design, by its whims of the moment.

Hence my conclusions as to the nature of the Primary Cause. Almighty? Yes, presumably, so far as this physical universe is concerned. Benevolent? Unproven and most unlikely. And certainly not identifiable as a person, with a human gender and a human appearance, in whose image we could possibly have been created.

Such reflections are, I know, far from being original with this writer. Henry Adams, after watching the painful death (from tetanus) of a greatly beloved elder sister, rejected the very idea that any personal Deity could “find pleasure or profit. . . in inflicting this torture upon a poor woman.” For pure blasphemy, this, he wrote, “made pure atheism a comfort. God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but He could not be a Person.”2

The Merciful Deity

Let me then turn to the other of the two features which, as I said, stand out on the map of my cosmology. I spoke above of what seems to me to be the miracle of the emergence in the human species, at some point in its development, of something that we can only call the human soul. It has been there ever since, in at least a good part of humanity. I see it not only as a sort of self-awareness that was not present in the animal, but also as the emergence in individual man of a certain moral autonomy—an ability to make choices and to design, within the limits of his mortality and his semi-animalistic nature, his own path. With that ability there came, of course, a commensurate measure of moral responsibility, unknown to the purely animalistic species. This sense of responsibility was in conflict with the purely animalistic aspects of the human personality; and so bitter was this conflict, so irreconcilable were the two within the confines of a single human frame, that the individual needed outside help, which could only be the help of faith, to make it endurable.

Simultaneously with the emergence of the soul there seems to me to have become evident the existence, and the involvement with human life, of a Deity of another sort—not the Primary Cause, this time, but something quite different: a Deity filled with understanding and compassion for the agonies inflicted on man by the conflict between his two natures, unable, to be sure, to spare him the realities of the animalistic one, but ready to help him, and capable of helping him, to come to terms with it. The Deity could do this only by becoming a part of man’s consciousness, by giving him an awareness of the divine presence, and by rendering him capable of the act of faith. We can only conclude that this Deity, if not indeed the creator of the innovation in man’s nature called the soul, was and is the companion to it—in this case the loving and caring companion, as the Primary Cause was not, and more than the companion: a part of the human person itself, sharing in its trials and dilemmas, and lending the strength necessary for their endurance.

There are, of course, a number of ways in which this Deity may be conceived. The customary one in Christian Scripture is the paternal image—“Our Father which art in heaven . . .”—to which countless millions of us have prayed. To many in the Middle Ages it was largely, if not entirely, the maternal imagine—the Virgin, the Mother of God—to which, in the first instance, faith was directed. I am not sure that these differences are important. Perhaps the Deity is to each person what that person most needs, and what he or she conceives it as being.

I, in any case, conceive it as a Substance, a Spirit, as Jesus himself is said once to have described it.3 It is essentially what is referred to in the Nicene Creed as “the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life.” But what, to me, distinguishes this Spirit from the all-powerful Deity of established Christian doctrine is precisely the fact that the Spirit bears, in my view, no responsibility for the natural order of things in which the human individual is compelled to live. It regards that order as a “given” factor in the defining of the human predicament—as one of the inalterable terms of the human problem; and it starts from there in the search for a response to that problem.4 The problem itself, then, is reduced to the question of how, within the framework of a natural order already established, the individual is to conduct himself in a manner consistent with the divine purpose. It is here that the intercession of the Spirit occurs, here that it is required, and here, when suitably asked for, that it will, in my deepest conviction, be forthcoming. For the Spirit is not, as I sense it and conceive it, some distant and all-powerful authority, standing wholly outside our predicament and disposing autocratically over all the factors affecting our lives. It is rather a participant in our struggle—a Spirit infused with understanding of and sympathy for our situation, involved as we are in the conflict between our physical and our spiritual natures, and prepared to give us such assistance as we deserve and can accept.

The Divine Injunction

And what might this assistance consist of?

I know of no way to make clear my idea of the answer to that question other than by recording what I seem to hear the Spirit saying to me as I turn to it for help: I, the Spirit says,

am a part of you. I am partly outside you, but also partly within you.51 am, of course, not all that is within you. There is also your physical frame, which confronts you with both limits and demands. To some extent these limits and demands are imperative, flowing as they do from the natural order. I did not create this order, and I cannot spare you the necessity of coming to terms with it. I can only help you to live under its shadow, and to a degree under its discipline, but to do this without sacrificing too much of the other side of your nature.

In all of this I can help you, of course, only in the degree that you would welcome the help and put forward your best effort to help yourself. It is in fact you who, by the dimensions of your own effort, define the limits of my usefulness.

And what help can I bring? I can bring, first and foremost, understanding. Remember that I, being a part of you, am a fellow sufferer in the face of your vicissitudes. I know the way you take. I know the progress. I also know the failure and reverses. I suffer from these latter just as you do. What I can give you is the awareness that in the most bitter struggles you are not alone.

I can also give you understanding and, to the extent that you deserve it, compassion. Where you do not deserve it (and there are such instances), you will not receive it; for it could then be of no help to you.

Finally, I can give you a certain strength that you, alone, do not and could not possess. For I am stronger than you are. You, in your present incarnation, are timebound and, in part, fleshbound. I am neither. Your efforts, without me, would be limited by your mortality. With my help, they can extend beyond that.

Not all of this will be entirely intelligible to you. Some of it will have to be taken on faith. Indeed, it is offered on the assumption that faith is forthcoming. It is important for you to recognize that, notwithstanding all the preoccupation with the scientific probing of nature that dominates the society of your time, life still has its mysteries (your own identity is one). Some of your hope must lie in your readiness to allow for the reality and the power of these mysteries. Recognize, then, that you were not meant to understand everything; and have the modesty to accept the limits that implies. Do what you can. Leave the rest to faith.

Such, then, is the moral instruction I fancy myself to receive from the Spirit whose nearness to me, and partial presence within me, I so clearly sense. It differs little, I suspect, from that which my father derived from his repeated reading of the Bible. The principal deviation would have been that from the Book of Job (his favorite work of Scripture) he presumably accepted the admonition to regard the ways of God, however inscrutable, as not to be questioned—even in their cruelest and most incomprehensible manifestations (of which he himself experienced no small number). In respecting this admonition he was, of course, accepting the identification of the Primary Cause with the loving and caring God in which so many of us have been taught to believe. This I find it difficult to do. And if this, in the eyes of some, be blasphemy, I would ask it to be noted that in denying to the Primary Cause the quality of being a caring and merciful father to us all, and in charging it with nothing more reprehensible than indifference, I am also absolving it of the charge, to which it might be otherwise vulnerable, of being a capricious and unfeeling tyrant.6 At the same time, I am absolving the merciful and beneficent Deity in which I do believe from the onus of creating as heartless and relentless a physical environmental as that in which human life is obliged to exist.

The Church

What I have described above is, of course, a purely personal view of a religious commitment. It purports to define the relationship of a single individual, alone and unaided, to the questions of faith. There will no doubt be readers who will say, Yes, but where do organized religion and the religious community come in? What about religion as a bond among large numbers of believers? What, in short, about the church? To those questions I can only say this:

I am well aware that for the vast majority of believers the manifestation of faith has been a collective, organized effort, normally put forward under the sort of leadership we have in mind when we use the word “church.” And I think I understand the very good reasons why this is so. Among them are the strengthening of the religious commitment by association with others in its various manifestations; the need of a great many people for an external spiritual discipline; the need for authoritative explication of the respective faith by persons schooled in the understanding of it; the need for discipline in personal behavior as in worship; the need for the performance of the sacraments by persons whose own professional-religious commitment gives them the stature and authority to fulfill this function; the value of the symbolism involved in organized worship; and so forth. I can understand that there are a great many people who are not entirely clear in their own minds what it is that they believe, or to what it commits them, and who need the sort of leadership and support only the church can give them.

I do not regard myself as being above these needs. I, too, welcome the chance to affirm my faith among numbers of others. I, too, welcome particularly the acceptance, implicit or explicit in most Christian rituals, of the equality of all naked human souls in the eyes of God. I, too, welcome the opportunity to participate in that acceptance by kneeling, together with anyone else who consents to kneel with similar humbleness, before the various symbols of faith. I find in this last, as do so many other people, support in the exercise of humility, which I regard as perhaps the greatest, certainly the closest to uniqueness, of the Christian virtues. So I do not view myself as being in any way above the need for much of what organized religion has to offer.

Nor do I have any negative feelings toward any of the great branches of the Christian church. I see greatness in them all. No one, in this respect, could be more ecumenical than myself.

I admire the Russian Orthodox church for the profound emotional depth of its religiosity; for its ready acceptance of the mysteries of faith; for the solemnity of its service and the great beauty of its ritual and its music. I see in it the nearest thing (except perhaps the Armenian church) to early Christianity.

For the Roman Catholic church I have feelings (at this point some of my ancestors will turn over in their graves) of high respect and, in some instances, of admiration. I respect it for many of its qualities: for its grandeur in scope and concept; for its very catholicity; for its paternal understanding for the needs of humble people everywhere; for its recognition of the values of order, and even hierarchy, in the spiritual guidance of great masses of people; for the commitment it demands of its own priests and other servants; for the rich and comforting intimacy it encourages, through the confessional, between saint and sinner. I respect it, too, for its part in the tremendous cultural advances of earlier ages—the great art and architecture, the religious music and literature, that have grown up through it and around it. It surely deserves to be seen as one of the greatest institutions of Western culture. And much of this goes as well for some of its partially rebellious children—outstandingly, the Church of England.

I do not omit, in this listing, that major component of the Christian faith that takes its departure from the Jewish religious culture in which Christ’s own life, albeit partly in a dissident posture, was rooted. How could I? Many of the elements of Old Testament faith and wisdom (I think particularly of the Books of Job, Proverbs, and Isaiah) are too much a part of Christianity itself, and especially of the faith of my Protestant forefathers, for me to deny my own debt to them. I recognize, in other words, in the origins of the Jewish faith of our own time, a very considerable part of the origins of my own.

I look, finally, sometimes with amusement and exasperation but never without deepest reverence and even emotional involvement, at the religious ways and convictions of my Protestant ancestors—Presbyterians, for the most part—at the simplicity and, in some respects, the purity of their commitment, and at their readiness to accept the utmost personal responsibility in the enactment of it. I can see how the sterner challenges of nature in the northern latitudes of Europe threw them back upon themselves—and how their own efforts bred in them certain qualities of independence and self-reliance, made them resistant to the authority of great, distant, and, as they saw it, more worldly spiritual powers, and moved them to see their relationship to God in their own way.

I can idealize none of these great ecclesiastical establishments. For all their greatness, they were and are intensely human institutions. I can see in all of them at one point or another manifestations of bigotry, intolerance, narrowness, sometimes even cruelty—manifestations that certainly had no place in Christ’s original teachings. But I also see them all as leading institutions of Western civilization and accept them all in the spirit of Christ’s reminder that there were, in his Father’s house, “many mansions.” I am grateful to the several of them that have given me, over the course of a life so largely itinerant as my own, their hospitality and have allowed me to share in their worship even when I could not fully share the form of their commitment.

I recall that my father once expressed to me (in a letter, I believe) in his old age the hope that, whatever life might still bring, I would always continue to go to church. I detect, in retrospect, a certain desperation in that appeal. He sensed, I am sure, the advance of a more skeptical and secular spirit, particularly among the youth. And the church meant so much to him. It was, in those dark final years, all he had to hang on to—the sole and final repository of hope in a life that otherwise offered little sustenance for it. He thought that someday it would be the same with me. I have respected his wish, wherever I thought I could, in the ensuing decades.

Nevertheless, all of that being said, the problem of religious faith has remained, for me, essentially an individual one: the effort of a single man to establish his relationship to forces beyond the reach of his own rational perception—forces upon the interaction with which he knew the ultimate value of his own life to depend.

Ethics

There remains one matter to mention before we leave the questions of faith. That is the subject of ethics.

The word “ethics” has a number of meanings; and since certain of those meanings are related both to philosophy and to faith, this is probably the proper place to consider them.

If the term “ethics” is taken to mean a system of ideal values purporting to be applicable to the conduct of men everywhere and in all times, then the discussion of it has no place in this book. To me there are no such things as abstract and universally applicable rules of ethics. There are certain qualities—notably, courage and loyalty—which, when taken in the crudest sense, the chauvinists of almost any country or society would readily claim as their own virtues. But both of those terms have broad spectra of meanings. Courage can be moral courage; it can also be physical recklessness. It can be the courage of terrorists and assassins. Similarly, there can be loyalties to flashy dictators, to fellow conspirators, and to criminal associates. But there can also be loyalties to standards, to values, to families and friends, to professional associates, to institutions. These are, in short, generally regarded as ethically admirable qualities; but their cultivation can and does take forms many of us would find it shameful to be sharing.

In large part, of course, what most of us would regard as ethically commendable values and virtues are culturally and sometimes religiously conditioned—culturally, even by those who are scarcely conscious of their own cultural inheritance; and religiously, even by those who would scoff at the mere suggestion that religion had anything to do with their reactions. I would attribute my own ethical values, for example, very prominently to the cultural-religious climate, inherited from long lines of Scottish and English ancestors, in which I was raised. And very ordinary values they would be, if one set out to list them—ordinary to the point of banality. They would include, in the outward sense, such things as generosity, kindness, courtesy, understanding, patience, and certain kinds of loyalty. In the inward sense they would include such things as modesty, self-control, self-discipline, sensitivity to the dictates of conscience, awareness of one’s own imperfections and the effort to struggle against them, humbleness in the face of one’s failures, and, finally, willingness to accept the trivia of life and to deal with them in the manner least offensive and least annoying to others. These are ethical commitments shared to one extent or another by a great many other people. But they will serve to illustrate what I deeply believe to be true: that the ethical values accepted and cultivated by the individual, aside from being partly culturally conditioned, are an intensely personal matter. They are in essence the subject of the individual struggle with the two conflicting sides of man’s nature, as described in the first chapter. This is a struggle in which, despite occasional setbacks, one can at times have the feeling of holding one’s own, but in which there can be—for most of us, at any rate—no sensational triumphs. I am glad to say that, looking about me within the circle of my own friends, I have the impression that most of them (and this is the source of my affection for them) seem, in the face of these problems, to be doing their best. I would hope that the same might be said of myself.

1. I was amused, some time after writing the above, to come across in Page Smith’s biography of John Adams (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), 1:29, the following paragraph, dealing with the residence of the young Adams in Worcester, Massachusetts:

There were few if any in Worcester to dispute such a formulation. The debate came over whether God was an active force in the universe, directing and superintending the operation of His natural laws and the particular destinies of men, or whether, as the Deists argued, He was simply the designer and builder of the universe—the “First Cause,” the Prime Mover, who, having put together a system of infinite complexity, wound it up, so to speak, and left it to run by the mechanical principles which He had devised for its proper functioning. This view, moreover, left in doubt, if it did not entirely banish, any concept of life after death, or a future state of punishments and rewards. John Adams was as determined to hold to the reality of a personal God and life beyond death as he was to eschew Calvinism’s insistence on predestination, infant damnation, election, and other tenets held in strictest observance by his Braintree forebears.

2. The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Modern Library, 1931), p. 289.

3. John 4:24.

4. I am reminded of General George Marshall’s injunction to those of us who worked under him: “Don’t fight the problem.” By this he meant, I am sure; Identify those terms of the problem that are not “given”—that are susceptible to being affected by your action; address your efforts to them and do not waste time or energy struggling against those that constitute the very structure of the problem.

5. Note Christ’s words to the Pharisees (Luke 17:20–21): “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation. Neither shall they say, Lo here! or lo there! for behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”

6. I am reminded, here, of Gibbon’s disgust with the Ascetics, whom he saw as inspired “by the savage enthusiasm which represents man as a criminal and God as a tyrant.” See Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. 38.