This is a day when there is much talk about the real, the valid, the authentic, the basic. In the jargon of our times we are interminably buffeted by such terms as “relevance,” “telling it like it is,” and “doing your own thing.”
It is also a time when, perhaps, there is abroad, in all the noise and clamor, less authenticity, less reality, less awareness of ourselves as we truly-are (that is, as we spiritually are) than ever before in the history of our nation. Man, always susceptible to delusions, is in a veritable trough of emotionalism, romanticism, anti-intellectualism. The consequence is a chaotic welter of impressions of ourselves—who we are, what we are here for, how we got here, and where we are headed. One man sees the skies filled with marvelous airplanes and space with astronauts, and concludes that we are at the pinnacle of civilization because of our machines. Another sees technology as a snare and a delusion, evidence only of the dehumanization and mechanization of the human spirit. One sees bulging libraries, packed with the latest studies of sociological processes, urban structures, educational theories, and religious reform, and concludes that we must have the answers to all our age-old problems. Others see only intellectual obfuscation, proliferation of the irrelevant, and nonsense.
Totally lacking is any kind of national—much less any kind of planetary—creed, set of beliefs, pattern of values, established goals. And none will ever be found, until we discover again a fixed center, a motionless center, to give meaning to all our motion. Without a sense of direction, motion becomes meaningless, a mere waste of energy, leading to exhaustion and death, as one lost in a wilderness dissipates his waning strength and finally collapses.
My present theme, however, is not this rather trite one of the spiritual and intellectual aimlessness of our times. It is, rather, a very specific and all-permeating truth about human life, startlingly visible, I believe, in modern life, but seen at all periods.
The Bible teaches many “hard truths,” truths that run counter to our natural inclinations and desires. Some of the teachings of Jesus are of this sort, “hard,” and we read that after he uttered some of them, many of his disciples abandoned him and followed him no more.
Of course life itself, quite apart from divine revelation, is often hard, not simply in episode but in principle. The inescapable fact that consequences follow actions, for example, is hard to accept. We are all familiar with the now-standard plea of student militants for amnesty, in advance, for whatever they are about to do. But life does not work that way. I cannot make a bargain with the law of gravity to protect me when I jump from the window. In the physical realm we slowly learn to accept this fact, and the codified results are called laws of nature. The Bible teaches that the law of inescapable consequences is equally true in the moral realm.
But I wish to narrow my theme even further. The very specific “hard” truth I have in mind is best conveyed in the words of Isaiah: “Yea, they have chosen their own ways, and their soul delighteth in their abominations. I also will choose their delusions, and will bring their fears upon them; because when I called, none did answer; when I spake, they did not hear: but they did evil before mine eyes, and chose that in which I delighted not” (Isa. 66:3, 4).
Two interlinked assertions: “They have chosen their own ways” and “I will choose their delusions.” Amazing juxtaposition, uttering a deep truth.
In Milton’s Paradise Lost this truth is expressed in what may be called the “Satanic predicament,” which is simply the fact that the rebel against God does not thereafter freely choose his own paths and his own way. Rather, judgment—silently, invisibly, unalterably—is handed down. Satan in Paradise Lost thinks that his every step is his own; actually his every step is controlled by God. Satan conceives that, now free, he can create his own environment, see himself as he truly is, conduct himself in the light of his own wisdom. Instead, he finds that all he can do is invert that which he already knows. If Paradise was filled with light, he can show his rebellion and freedom by filling Pandemonium with darkness; if Paradise was motivated by love, Pandemonium can be motivated by hatred and envy; if the nature of Paradise is order and harmony, Pandemonium can be disorder and discord.
At every point Satan’s predicament is that, unwillingly, unwittingly, he condemns himself. At his moment of highest arrogance and power, when he addresses myriad ranks of fallen angels, suddenly he finds his legs entwining themselves, becoming serpentine coils, until, cast to earth, he writhes and hisses.
There is a distant echo of the Satanic predicament in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Having willed his own freedom and deity, Stephen finds he is able to invent nothing, only to invert what he knows of God and his ways. Just as the medieval Satanic cults could think of nothing to do except to say the Lord’s Prayer backwards, to involve ritual in filth instead of beauty, to praise and laud darkness and tyranny instead of light and love, so all men in all places enslave themselves when they rebel against God and condemn themselves merely to reversing all that God is. The rebel finds he possesses no power of creation, true creation, the making of something from nothing. As a creature of God, made for God’s glory, he has no purpose, no role, no objective, in one sense no reality, once he is willfully severed from allegiance to him who alone is Creator. “Hear, O earth: behold, I will bring evil upon this people, even the fruits of their thoughts, because they have not hearkened unto my words, nor to my law, but rejected it (Jer. 6:19).” “Thine own wickedness shall correct thee, and thy backslidings shall reprove thee: know therefore and see that it is an evil thing and bitter, that thou has forsaken the LORD thy God, and that my fear is not in thee, saith the Lord GOD of Hosts” (Jer. 2:19).
Men love to pretend that “this evil thing,” this rebellion, is innocent, or at worst the mere result of ignorance and circumstance. This, indeed, is one of the delusions they unknowingly fix upon themselves: that man is the product of random accident, without meaning or purpose, and hence without responsibility for his actions. Writes Bertrand Russell (surely, in the earthly sense, one of the most brilliant minds of our century):
That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcomes of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the fast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built [A Free Man’s Worship, December, 1903; printed in the Independent Review].
The Apostle Peter, however, asserts that disbelief in the purposefulness of the universe, and in the fact that God made it, is willful: “For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water” (2 Pet. 3:5).
We hear many smiling and sophisticated statements from cynics to the effect that we should live it up while we can, while we are free, and not anticipate the judgment, if any. What they do not realize is that God’s judgment of delusions is already upon them, not theoretically or metaphysically, but literally: they even now labor under the delusions God has chosen for them.
The first exhilaration of declaring defiance of God is heady. Remember Milton’s depiction of Adam and Eve immediately after the Fall; remember Faustus in Marlowe’s play—the excitement, the delighted anticipation of total freedom. No rules to hamper desire; no restraints to impede gratification; no conscience to utter its dull warning.
In some ways, we have seen the Western world go through this period of euphoria, when, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, prophets like H. G. Wells and G. B. Shaw were preaching victory through humanism, man’s own unaided rule of his planet. “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul,” announced Henley. Man is a totally material being, insisted T. H. Huxley, and material may be manipulated so as to produce inevitable progress. All environments tend inevitably toward perfection, intoned Charles Darwin.
How quaint all this optimism seems now. How absurd to declare, standing on a plundered, polluted, blood-soaked planet, that all environments tend inevitably toward perfection! Surely God chose a fearful delusion when he led rebellious man into the paths of materialistic humanism. How visible now the dross behind the early glitter of optimism, the horror behind the smiling image of man self-deified (“Glory to man in the highest,” cried Swinburne).
The disillusionment of our day is well expressed in a few words from the “Theatre for Ideas,” held in New York City in March, 1969. Said Robert Lowell: “The world is absolutely out of control now, and it’s not going to be saved by reason or unreason.” Said Norman Mailer: “Somewhere, something incredible happened in history—the wrong guys won.” Similarly, Robert Jay Clifton, summarizing a position taken by Arthur Koestler in a new book, writes: “It is easy these days—this century—to defend the idea that something ails man.” And he quotes Koestler as presuming “ ‘some built-in error or deficiency,’ or more vividly, ‘a screw loose in the human mind.… He suffers from an endemic form of paranoia’ ” (New York Times Book Review, April 7, 1968, p. 3.)
This diagnosis of an inherent dis-ease is accurate; but there still continues the effort to blame it on something outside the responsibility of man—on genes, or an extra chromosome, or chance, or even the stars. The Bible does not permit this: “We have turned every one to his own way” (Isa. 53:6). “They have chosen their own ways, and their soul delighteth in their abominations” (Isa. 66:3). “There is no judgment in their goings: they have made them crooked paths” (Isa. 59:8). “I have spread out my hands all the day unto a rebellious people which walketh in a way that was not good, after their own thoughts” (Isa. 65:2). “They refused to hearken, and pulled away the shoulder, and stopped their ears, that they should not hear. Yea, they made their hearts as an adamant stone, lest they should hear the law.…” (Zech. 7:11, 12). And, with typical irony, the author of Ecclesiastes: “Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes: but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment” (11:9).
Our Brave New World, our 1984, are almost upon us. The delusion of a universe without God has shown, through its cosmetics, the lineaments of a corpse. Writes the modern English painter, Francis Bacon: “Life itself is a tragic thing. We watch ourselves from the cradle, performing into decay. Man now realizes that he is an accident, a completely futile thing, that he has to play out the game without reason” (Time, Nov. 1, 1963). And how appropriate it is for Jim Morrison of the rock group known as The Doors to say: “I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that has no meaning. It seems to me to be the road to freedom” (Time, Nov. 24, 1967).
Now, to this point I have spoken of only one of the myriad delusions rebellious man has suffered from as a result of the judgment of God upon disobedience. Clearly the list is endless—the delusion of power, of hedonistic self-indulgence, of statism, of scientism, of ecclesiastical authoritarianism, of spiritualism, and so on. I will comment, however, on only one other, one that follows naturally upon the contemporary abandonment of the delusion of materialistic humanism.
If, as I think, the voice of automatic human progress these days sounds dim and cracked; if the instruments of social harmony are shattered on the rock of self-aggrandizement, racial strife, and militant nationalism; if the hope that more science will inevitably better the human lot lies in rubble; if when we look outward we see only (if we are young) a discredited Establishment or (if we are old) disorderly, uneducated, and perhaps uneducable youth—if all this, where do we turn next?
One of the unsung high priests of our day, D. H. Lawrence, gives us a deluded answer: Turn inward. “This place,” he wrote—meaning the world about us—“is no good.” “One must look for another world.” “This world is only a tomb.” “I must step off in space somewhere.” And the only direction left is inward.
Only by turning in to himself, by introspection, by defining good as the unpremeditated eruption of self-ness, by declaring that our isness is our entirety, by intensifying that isness through happenings, be-ins, and group-gropes—only by these means shall we at last find meaning and peace.
This, the current delusion, leads man into the darkest and most hopeless prison of all; for to declare my perfect freedom from everything—from environment, from home, from state, from rules, from society, from parents, from universe—simply to be—is infallibly to declare my total irrelevance. That which has no ties of relationship to anything whatever is, by definition, irrelevant, related to nothing.
Even worse, men have, as Wyndham Lewis wrote in Blast No. 1 several decades ago, “a loathesome deformity called Self; affliction got through indiscriminate rubbing against their fellows: social excrescence.… Only one operation can cure it: the suicide’s knife.” “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Self-love festers inevitably into self-disgust. The highest form of self-criticism, as the cynic has said, is suicide. Just as the delusion of a God-less universe leads to the horrors of infinite chaos and meaninglessness for social, corporate man, so the delusion that the individual can find freedom and release by living entirely within himself leads to the vision of “self” as graphically offered in a “pop” song: “A splotch, a blotch. Be careful of the blob.… It creeps, and leaps, and glides and slides across the floor. Beware the blob.”
Judgment is not withheld. “God is angry with the wicked every day. If he turn not, he will not whet his sword; he hath bent his bow, and made it ready. He hath also prepared for him the instruments of death” (Ps. 7:11–13). Remember the cry of Samuel Beckett’s character in The Unnamable: “… where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
“They mocked the messengers of God, and despised his words, and misused his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord arose against his people, till there was no remedy” (2 Chron. 36:16). The Bible speaks of a place for those whose rebellion against God is eternal, and calls it Hell. But if we want a description of what that place is like, in detail and feeling, we need only turn to the writings of those who have faithfully followed the delusion of self-as-center.
Among the more fearful consequences of this delusion is the willful, deliberate, hideous murder of one of our divine attributes: Reason. Once the central irrationality has taken place in the words, “I am my own All-in-All,” then there fly out random fragments of the disintegrated mind, the jagged, cutting pieces of man’s disordered creativity, forming so many modern novels, plays, pictures, philosophies. Truly, as certain French existentialists have said, the problem of the nineteenth century was the death of God; that of the twentieth century is the death of man.
I turn now from two delusions—the delusion of a God-less, random universe, and the delusion of total self-centeredness—to one great reality. It is this: Just as God is faithful to bring judgment upon the rebel, so he is infinitely long-suffering and gracious to the repentant wanderer who returns to him. “Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD” (Ezek. 18:23). We may choose what words God will address to us. Either: “I will choose [thy] delusions.” Or: “I will instruct thee and teach in the way which thou shalt go; I will guide thee with mine eye” (Ps. 32:8). “Call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me” (Ps. 50:15). “And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you; I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you” (Isa. 46:4).
Calvin D. Linton is professor of English literate and dean of Columbian College, The George washington University, Washington, D.C. He holds the A.B. from George Washington and the A.M. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins.
