A University is a society for the pursuit
of learning.
As students, you will be expected to make
yourselves, or to start making yourselves,
in to what the Middle Ages called clerks:
into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics,
or historians.
And at first sight this seems to be an odd
thing to do during a great war.
What is the use of beginning a task which
we have so little chance of finishing?
Or, even if we ourselves should happen not
to be interrupted by death or military service,
why should we -- indeed how can we -- continue
to take an interest in these placid occupations
when the lives of our friends and the liberties
of Europe are in the balance?
Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns?
Now it seems to me that we shall not be able
to answer these questions until we have put
them by the side of certain other questions
which every Christian ought to have asked
himself in peace-time.
I spoke just now of fiddling while Rome burns.
But to a Christian the true tragedy of Nero
must be not that he fiddles while the city
was on fire but that he fiddles on the brink
of hell.
You must forgive me for the crude monosyllable.
I know that many wiser and better Christians
than I in these days do not like to mention
heaven and hell even in a pulpit.
I know, too, that nearly all the references
to this subject in the New Testament come
from a single source.
But then that source is Our Lord Himself.
People will tell you it is St. Paul, but that
is untrue.
These overwhelming doctrines are dominical.
They are not really removable from the teaching
of Christ or of His Church.
If we do not believe them, our presence in
this
church is great tomfoolery.
If we do, we must sometime overcome our spiritual
prudery and mention them.
The moment we do so we can see that every
Christian who comes to a university must at
all times face a question compared with which
the questions raised by the war are relatively
unimportant.
He must ask himself how it is right, or even
psychologically possible,for creatures who
are every moment advancing either to heaven
or to hell, to spend any fraction of the little
time allowed them in this world on such comparative
trivialities as literature or art, mathematics
or biology.
If human culture can stand up to that, it
can stand up to anything.
To admit that we can retain our interest in
learning under the shadow of these eternal
issues, but not under the shadow of a European
war, would be to admit that our ears are closed
to the voice of reason and very wide open
to the voice of our nerves and our mass emotions.
This indeed is the case with most of us: certainly
with me.
For that reason I think it important to try
to see the present calamity in a true perspective,
The war creates no absolutely new situation:
it simply aggravates the permanent human situation
so that we can no longer ignore it.
Human life has always been lived on the edge
of a precipice.
Human culture has always had to exist under
the shadow of something infinitely more important
than itself.
If men had postponed the search for knowledge
and beauty until they were secure the search
would never have begun.
We are mistaken when we compare war with "normal
life".
Life has never been normal.
Even those periods which we think most tranquil,
like the nineteenth century, turn out, on
closer inspection, to be full of crisis, alarms,
difficulties, emergencies.
Plausible reasons have never been lacking
for putting off all merely cultural activities
until some imminent danger has been
averted or some crying injustice put right.
But humanity long ago chose to neglect those
plausible reasons.
They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and
would not wait for the suitable moment that
never come.
Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon
but, significantly, the Funeral Oration.
The insects have chosen a different line:
they have sought first the material welfare
and security of the hive, and presumable they
have their reward.
Men are different.They propound mathematical
theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical
arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on
scaffold, discuss, the last new poem while
advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb
their hair at Thermopylae.
This is not panache; it is our nature.
But since we are fallen creatures the fact
that this is now our nature would not, by
itself, prove that it is rational or right.
We have to inquire whether there is really
any legitimate place for the activities of
the scholar in a world such as this.
That is, we have always to answer the question:
"How can you be so frivolous and selfish as
to think about anything but the salvation
of human souls?" and we have, at the moment,
to answer the additional question, "How can
you be so frivolous and selfish as to think
of anything but the war?"
Now part of our answer will be the same for
both questions.
The one implies that our life can, and ought,
to become exclusively and explicitly religious:
the other, that it can and ought to become
exclusively national.
I believe that our whole life can, and indeed
must, become religious in a sense to be explained
later.
But if it is meant that all our activities
are to be of the kind that can be recognized
as "sacred" and ties are to be of the kind
that can be recognized as "sacred" and opposed
to "secular" then I
would give a single reply to both my imaginary
assailants.
I would say, "Whether it ought to happen or
not, the thing you are recommending is not
going to happen."
Before I became a Christian I do not think
I fully realized that one's life, after conversion,
would inevitably consist in doing most of
the same things one had been doing before:
one hopes, in a new spirit, but still the
same things.
Before I went to the last war I certainly
expected that my life in the trenches would,
in some mysterious sense, be all war.
In fact, I found that the nearer you got to
the front line the less everyone spoke and
thought of the allied cause and the progress
of the campaign; and I am pleased to find
that Tolstoy, in the greatest war book ever
written, records the same thing -- and so,
in its own way, does the Iliad.
Neither conversion nor enlistment in the army
is really going to obliterate our human life.
Christians and solders are still men: the
infidel's idea of a religious life, and the
civilian's idea of active service, are fantastic.
If you attempted, in either case, to suspend
your whole intellectual and aesthetic activity,
you would only succeed in substituting a worse
cultural life for a better.
You are not, in fact, going to read nothing,
either in the Church or in the line: if you
don't read good books you will read bad ones.
If you don't go on thinking rationally, you
will think irrationally.
If you reject aesthetic satisfactions you
will fall into sensual satisfactions.
There is therefore this analogy between the
claims of our religion and the claims of the
war: neither of them for most of us, will
simply cancel or remove from the slate the
merely human life which we were leading before
we entered them.
But they will operate in this way for different
reasons.
The war will fail to absorb our whole attention
because it is a finite object, and therefore
intrinsically unfitted to support the whole
attention of a human soul.
In order to avoid misunderstanding I must
here
make a few distinctions.
I believe our cause to be, as human causes
go, very righteous, and I therefore believe
it to be a duty to participate in this war.
And every duty is a religious duty, and our
obligation to perform every duty is therefore
absolute.
Thus we may have a duty to rescue a drowning
man, and perhaps, if we live on a dangerous
coast, to learn life-saving so as to be ready
for any drowning man when he turns up.
It may be our duty to lose our own lives in
saving him.
But if anyone devoted himself to life-saving
in the sense of giving it his total attention
--so that he thought and spoke of nothing
else and demanded the cessation of all other
human activities until everyone had learned
to swim -- he would be a monomaniac.
The rescue of drowning men is, then aduty
worth dying for, but not worth living for.
It seems to me that all political duties (among
which I include military duties) are of this
kind.
A man may have to die for our country: but
no man must, in any exclusive sense, live
for his country.
He who surrenders himself without reservation
to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party,
or a class is rendering to Caesar that which,
of all things, most emphatically belongs to
God: himself.
It is for a very different reason that religion
cannot occupy the whole of life in the sense
of excluding all our natural activities.
For, of course, in some sense, it must occupy
the whole of life.
There is no question of a compromise between
the claims of God and the claims of culture,
or politics, or anything else.
God's claim is infinite and inexorable.
You can refuse it: or you can begin to try
to grant it.
There is no middle way.
Yet in spite of this it is clear that Christianity
does not exclude any of the ordinary human
activities.
St. Paul tells people to get on with their
jobs.
He even assumes that Christians may go to
dinner parties, and, what is more, dinner
parties given by pagans.
Our Lord attends a wedding and provides
miraculous wine.
Under the aegis of His Church, and in the
most Christian ages, learning and the arts
flourish.
The solution of this paradox is, of course,
well know to you.
"Whether ye eat or drink or whatsoever ye
do, do all to the glory of God."
All our merely natural activities will be
accepted, if they are offered to God, even
the humblest: and all of them, even the noblest,
will be sinful if they are not.
Christianity does not simply replace our natural
life and substitute a new one: it is rather
a new organization which exploits, to its
own supernatural ends, these natural materials.
No doubt, in a given situation, it demands
the surrender of some, or al all, our merely
human pursuits: it is better to be saved with
one eye, than, having two, to be cast into
Gehanna.
But it does this, in a sense, per accidens
-- because, in those special circumstances,
it has ceased to be possible to practice this
or that activity to the glory of God.
There is no essential quarrel between the
spiritual life and the human activities as
such.
Thus the omnipresence of obedience to God
in a Christian's life is, in a way, analogous
to the omnipresence of God in space.
God does not fill space as a body fills it,
in the sense that parts of Him are in different
parts of space, excluding other object from
them.
Yet He is everywhere -- totally present at
every point of space --according to good theologians.
We are now in a position to answer the view
that human culture is an inexcusable frivolity
on the part of creatures loaded with such
awful responsibilities as we.
I reject at once an idea which lingers in
the mind of some modern people that cultural
activities are in their own right
spiritual and meritorious -- as though scholars
and poets were intrinsically more pleasing
to God than scavengers and bootblacks.
I think it was Matthew Arnold who first used
the
English word spiritual in the sense of the
German geistlich, and so inaugurated this
most dangerous and most anti- Christian error.
Let us clear it forever from our minds.The
work of a Beethoven, and the work of a charwoman,
become spiritual on precisely the same condition,
that of being offered to God, of being done
humbly "as to the Lord".
This does not, of course, mean that it is
for anyone a mere toss-up whether he should
sweep rooms or compose symphonies.
A mole must dig to the glory of God and a
cock must crow.
We are members of one body, but differentiated
members, each with his own vocation.
A man's upbringing, his talents, his circumstances,
are usually a tolerable index of his vocation.
If our parents have sent us to Oxford, if
our country allows us to remain there, this
is prima facie evidence that the life which
we, at any rate, can best lead to the glory
of God at present is the learned life.
By leading that life to the glory of God I
do not, of course, mean any at tempt to make
our intellectual inquiries work out to edifying
conclusions.
That would be, as Bacon says, to offer to
the author of truth the unclean sacrifice
of a lie.
I mean the pursuit of knowledge and beauty,
in a sense, for their own sake, but in a sense
which does not exclude their being for God's
sake.
An appetite for these things exists in the
human mind, and God makes no appetite in vain.
We can therefore pursue knowledge as such,
and beauty, as such, in the sure confidence
that by so doing we are either advancing to
the vision of God ourselves or indirectly
helping others to do so.
Humility, no less than the appetite, encourages
us to concentrate simply on the knowledge
or the beauty, not too much concerning ourselves
with their ultimate relevance to the vision
of God.
That relevance may not be intended for us
but for our betters -- for men who
come after and find the spiritual significance
of what we dug out in blind and humble obedience
to our vocation.
This is the teleological argument that the
existence of the impulse and the faculty prove
that they must have a proper function in God's
scheme -- the argument by which Thomas Aquinas
probes that sexuality would have existed even
without the Fall.
The soundness of the argument, as regards
culture, is proved by experience.
The intellectual life is not the only road
to God, nor the safest, but we find it to
be a road, and it may be the appointed road
for us.
Of course, it will be so only so long as we
keep the impulse pure and disinterested.
That is the great difficulty.
As the author of the Theologia Germanicai
says, we may come to love knowledge -- our
knowing -- more than the thing known: to delight
not in the exercise of our talents but in
the fact that they are ours, or even in the
reputation they bring us.
Every success in the scholar's life increases
this danger.
If it becomes irresistible, he must give up
his scholarly work.
The time for plucking our the right eye has
arrived.
That is the essential nature of the learned
life as I see it.
But it has indirect values which are especially
important today.
If all the world were Christian, it might
not matter if all the world were uneducated.
But, as it is, a cultural life will exist
outside the Church whether it exists inside
or not.
To be ignorant and simple now -- not to be
able to meet the enemies on their own ground
-- would be to throw down our weapons, and
the betray our uneducated brethren who have,
under God, no defense but us against the intellectual
attacks of the heathen.
Good philosophy must exist, if for no other
reason, because bad philosophy needs to be
answered.
The cool intellect must work not only against
cool
intellect on the other side, but against the
muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect
altogether.
Most of all, perhaps we need intimate knowledge
of the past.
Not that the past has any magic about it,
but because we cannot study the future, and
yet need something to set against the present,
to remind us that periods and that much which
seems certain to the uneducated is merely
temporary fashion.
A man who has lived in many place is not likely
to be deceived by the local errors of his
native village: the scholar has lived in many
times and is therefore in some degree immune
form the great cataract of nonsense that pours
from the press and the microphone of his own
age.
The learned life then is, for some, a duty.
At the moment it looks as if it were your
duty.
I am well aware that there may seem to be
an almost comic discrepancy between the high
issues we have been considering and the immediate
task you may be set down to, such as Anglo-Saxon
sound laws or chemical formulae.
But there is a similar shock awaiting us in
every vocation -- a young priest finds himself
involved in choir treats and a young subaltern
in accounting for pots of jam.
It is well that it should be so.
It weeds out the vain, windy people and keeps
in those who are both humble and tough.
On that kind of difficulty we need waste no
sympathy.
But the peculiar difficulty imposed on you
by the war is another matter: and of it I
would again repeat, what I have been saying
in one form or another ever since I started
-- do not let your nerves and emotions lead
you into thinking your present predicament
more abnormal than it really is.
Perhaps it may be useful to mention the three
mental
exercises which may serve as defenses against
the three enemies which war raises up against
the scholar.
The first enemy is excitement -- the tendency
to think and feel about the war when we had
intended to think about our work.
The best defense is a recognition that in
this, as in everything else, the war has not
really raised up a new enemy but only aggravated
an old one.
There are always plenty of rivals to our work.
We are always falling in love or quarreling,
looking for jobs or fearing to lose them,
getting ill and recovering, following public
affairs.
If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting
for some distraction or other to end before
we can really get down to our work.
The only people who achieve much are those
who want knowledge so badly that they seek
it while the conditions are still unfavorable.
Favorable conditions never come.
There are, of course, moments when the pressure
of the excitement is so great that any superhuman
self-control could not resist it.
They come both in war and peace.
We must do the best we can.
The second enemy is frustration -- the feeling
that we shall not have time to finish.
If I say to you that no one has time to finish,
that the longest human life leaves a man,
in any branch of learning, a beginner, I shall
seem to you to be saying something quite academic
and theoretical.
You would be surprised if you knew how soon
one begins to feel the shortness of the tether:
of how many things, even in middle life, we
lave to say "No time for that", "Too late
now", and "Not for me".
But Nature herself forbids you to share that
experience.
A more Christian attitude, which can be attained
at any age, is that of leaving futurity in
God's hands.
We may as well, for God will certainly retain
it whether we leave it to Him or not.
Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue
or your happiness to the future.
Happy work is best done by
the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat
lightly and works from moment to moment "as
to the Lord".
It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged
to ask for.
The present is the only time in which any
duty can be done or any grace received.
The third enemy is fear.
War threatens us with death and pain.
No man -- and specially no Christian who remembers
Gethsemane -- need try to attain a stoic indifference
about these things: but we can guard against
the illusions of the imagination.
We think of the streets of Warsaw and contrast
the deaths there suffered with an abstraction
called Life.
But there is no question of death or life
for any of us; only a question of this death
or of that -- of a machine gun bullet now
or a cancer forty years later.
What does war do to death?
It certainly does not make it more frequent;
100 per cent of us die, and the percentage
cannot be increased.
It puts several deaths earlier; but I hardly
suppose that that is what we fear.
Certainly when the moment comes, it will make
little difference how many years we have behind
us.
Does it increase our chance of a painful death?
I doubt it.
As far as I can find out, what we call natural
death is usually preceded by suffering; and
a battlefield is one of the very few places
where one has a reasonable prospect of dying
with no pain at all.
Does it decrease our chances of dying at peace
with God?
I cannot believe it.
If active service does not persuade a man
to prepare for death, what conceivable concatenation
of circumstance would?
Yet war does do something to death.
It forces us to remember it.
The only reason why the cancer at sixty or
the paralysis at seventy- five do not bother
us is that we forget them.
War makes death real to us: and that would
have been regarded as one of its blessings
by most of the great Christians of the past.
They thought it good for us to be always aware
of our mortality.
I am inclined to think they were right.
All the animal life in us, all schemes of
happiness that centered in this world, were
always doomed to a final frustration.
In ordinary times only a wise man can realize
it.
Now the stupidest of us know.
We see unmistakable the sort of universe in
which we have all along been living, and must
come to terms with it.
If we had foolish un-Christian hopes about
human culture, they are now shattered.
If we thought we were building up a heaven
on earth, if we looked for something that
would turn the present world from a place
of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying
the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and
not a moment too soon.
But if we thought that for some souls, and
at some times, the life of learning, humbly
offered to God, was, in its own small way,
one of the appointed approaches to the Divine
reality and the Divine beauty which we hope
to enjoy hereafter, we can think so still.
