The Aristos

health, good fortune and happiness. But such gratitude should be ploughed back into the life around one, into one’s manner of being; not thrown vaguely into the sky or poured into that most odious of concealed narcissisms, prayer. Religion stands between people’s gratitude and the practical uses they might put its energy to. One good work is worth more than a million good words; and this would be true even if there were an observing and good-mark- awarding god ‘above’ us.

32 I reject Christianity, along with the other great religions. Most of its mysteries are remote from the true mystery. Though I admire the founder, though I admire many priests and many Christians, I despise the church. It is because men want to be good and do good that it has survived so long; like Communism, it is inherently parasitical on a deeper and more mysterious nobility in man than any existing religion or political creed can satisfy.

LAMAISM

33 Life is pain, suffering, betrayal, catastrophe, and even its pleasures are delusions; the wise man teaches himself to empty his mind of all that is mere triviality, futile flux, and thus learns to live in a state of mystical inward peace. Man is brought into the world in order that he may, by ascesis, train himself to withdraw from it, and thus, it is claimed, transcend it. So the lama refuses to participate in society; it is by extirpating his animal desires and his vain life in society that demonstrates true freedom. He does not resist the nemo; he invites it.

34 Recent world history has driven many in all the continents into this view of life. Few can withdraw totally from their society. But there is a secular lamaism that is widespread. These semi-lamas can be identified as follows: they refuse to commit themselves in any meaningful way on any social or political or metaphysical questions, and not because of genuine scepticism, but because of indifference to society and aU that is connected with it.

35 A semi-lama is one who thinks that to ask nothing of his fellow men permits him to insist that nothing shall be asked of him; as if, in the human context, to contract no debts is to owe nothing. But we aU drift on the same raft. There is only one question. What sort of shipwrecked man shall I be?

36 Freedom of will can be increased only by exercise But the only place where such exercise can be got is in society; and to opt out of that is to opt out of opting. If I jump off a high building I prove I can jump; but I am the one who most needs the proof. The proof is meaningless if I cannot apply it. Why prove Pythagoras to a corpse?

37 The lama allows his desire to be free of society to dupe him into thinking he is indeed free. He no longer sees the prison walls. Nothing will make him believe they exist.

38 There is in oriental lamaism an acute apprehension of the nature of ‘God’. But the mistake is to use this apprehension as a model for humans to copy. Lamaism tells us to make a sustained attempt to achieve oneness with ‘God’, or nothingness. Living, I must learn not to be, or to be as if I was not; individual, I must lose all individuality; I must totally withdraw from all life and yet be in total sympathy with all life. But if we were all lamas it would be as if we were all masturbators: life would end. ‘God’ is in contrast to us; it is our pole. And it is not by imitating it, as the Tao Te Ching recommends, that we honour it; nor does it need honouring.

39 The semi-lama is usually a sensitive person who finds himself frustrated and horrified by the futility and ugliness of life around him. His lamasery is commonly art, which he loves and regards in a characteristically narcissistic and barren way. He enjoys form rather than content; style rather than meaning; vogue rather than social significance; fastidiousness rather than strength. He will often get more pleasure from the minor arts than the major ones, and more pleasure from minor works of art than from major ones. He becomes a connoisseur, a collector, a hypersensitive critic. A taster, a tongue, a palate, or an eye, an ear; and all the rest of his humanity becomes atrophied and drops away.

40 It is true that lamaism, especially in such forms as Zen Buddhism, has a great deal to tell us about the enjoyment of objects as objects; about the beauty of the leaf and the beauty of the leaf in the wind. But this perfecting of the aesthetic sense and this clarifying of the inner metaphor in each, cannot be taken as a way of life. It may be, almost certainly is, a constituent of the good life; but it is not the good life.

41 Lamaism, the withdrawal into self-preoccupation or self-enjoyment, is the perennial philosophy; that is, the philosophy against which all others (like Chris-tianty) are erected. To the extent that we have to nourish self in order to remain healthy psychologically it is as important as the food we eat. But clearly it will flourish most when the self, or individual, feels most defeated and most in danger. The most frequent argument in defence of it then is that someone must guard and preserve the highest standards of living. In the lives of even the most selfish castes and elites there is something good in itself; but this is surely the most relative goodness of all. Early Sevres porcelain is beautiful; but it was not made only of clay, it was made also of the emaciated flesh and bones of every French peasant who starved during the period of its making. All the luxuries we buy ourselves are paid for in the same coin; no economic or cultural plea is sound in the final analysis. Under all its names – hedonism, epicureanism, ‘beat’ philosophy – lamaism is a resource of the defeated. There might be worlds and systems of existence where it was tenable; but not in one like ours, in a permanent state of evolutionary war.

HUMANISM

42 Humanism is a philosophy of the law, of what can be rationally established. It has two great faults. One lies in its inherent contempt for the mysterious, the irrational and the emotional. The other is that humanism is of its nature tolerant: but tolerance is the observer’s virtue, not the governor’s.

43 The characteristic movement of the humanist is to withdraw; to live on the Sabine farm; to write Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo. A humanist is someone who sees good in his enemies and good in their philosophies; he sees good in his enemies because he cannot accept that they are freely evil, and he sees good in their philosophies because no philosophy is without some reason and some humanity. He lives by the golden mean, by reason, by the middle of the road, by seeing both sides; he captures respect, but not the imagination.*

44 It is conventionally held that ancient polytheistic humanism collapsed because it was unrealistic, a highly artificial system. But there is a sense in which it was realistic, as we should expect in any religion springing from Greek origins. The gods on Olympus at least represented actual human attributes, or varying and often conflicting archetypal human tendencies; while the Hebraic system – the uniting of desirable (moralistic) human attributes into one god – was a highly artificial procedure. In many ways the Greek system is the more rational and intelligent; which perhaps explains why it has been the less appealing. The Hebrew god is a creation of man; and the Greek gods are a reflection of him.

45 We often forget to what an extent the Renaissance, and all its achievements, sprang from a reversion to the Greek system. The relationship between paganism and freedom of thought is too well established to need proof; and all monotheistic religions are in a sense puritan in tone – inherently tyrannical and fascistic. The great scientific triumphs of the Greeks, their logic, their democracy, their arts, all were made possible by their loose, fluid concepts of divinity; and the same is true of the most recent hundred years of human history.

46 But the opposition is not, of course, simply between a ‘liberal’ polytheism and an ‘illiberal’ monotheism. Religion has always been for man intensely a field of self-interest; and it is plainly harder to bargain with, or blindly believe in, several gods than one. A certain scepticism and agnosticism, so characteristic of the best Greek thought, is a natural product of polytheism; just as emotional enthusiasm and mystic fervour breed from its opposite. This conflict between scepticism and mysticism long pre-dates the Christian era.

47 Like modern humanists, the ancient Milesians did not believe in an afterlife or in any god. Then, in the seventh and eighth centuries before Christ, came the Orphic revivalist invasion with its Irish stew of redemption, salvation and predestined grace, and all the power of its wild mysteries. By the fifth century the battle between Orphic mysticism and Milesian scepticism was permanent. There has never been peace since between Dionysus and Apollo, and there never will be.*

48 Nonetheless, periods of history come when it seems clear which serves the general need best.