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This file contains:
Handwritten letter from a "Billy" (possibly Billy Graham) to RN on Casa Blanca Inn (Scottsdale, AZ) stationery, welcoming RN to Arizona, conveying regrets at not being able to attend that evening's rally. 1 pg (front and back). 2 pgs scanned. [Letter], 5S
Casa Blanca Inn (Scottsdale, AZ) envelope from a "Billy" (possibly Billy Graham) to RN. Handwritten note above address area indicates "RN Called". 1 pg. [Other Document], n.d.
Photocopied book excerpt to Rose Woods, sender unknown. Excerpted pages alternately titled "An Analysis of Growth" and "The Growths of Civilizations". Covers ancient philosophers, religious figures. 15 pgs total (cover + excerpt). 15 pgs scanned. [Book
Card from unknown to RN. 2 pgs. [Letter], 5/14/1974
Envelope for RN. Sender unknown. 1 pg. [Other Document], N.D.
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WHSF: Returned, 4-11
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WHSF: Returned, 4-11
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This file contains:
Handwritten letter from a "Billy" (possibly Billy Graham) to RN on Casa Blanca Inn (Scottsdale, AZ) stationery, welcoming RN to Arizona, conveying regrets at not being able to attend that evening's rally. 1 pg (front and back). 2 pgs scanned. [Letter], 5S
Casa Blanca Inn (Scottsdale, AZ) envelope from a "Billy" (possibly Billy Graham) to RN. Handwritten note above address area indicates "RN Called". 1 pg. [Other Document], n.d.
Photocopied book excerpt to Rose Woods, sender unknown. Excerpted pages alternately titled "An Analysis of Growth" and "The Growths of Civilizations". Covers ancient philosophers, religious figures. 15 pgs total (cover + excerpt). 15 pgs scanned. [Book
Card from unknown to RN. 2 pgs. [Letter], 5/14/1974
Envelope for RN. Sender unknown. 1 pg. [Other Document], N.D.
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Richard M. Nixon's Returned Materials Collection
Returned White House Special Files
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Richard Nixon Presidential Library
White House Special Files Collection
Folder List
Box Number Folder Number Document Date
Document Type
Document Description
4
11
05/03/1974
Letter
Handwritten letter from a "Billy" (possibly
Billy Graham) to RN on Casa Blanca Inn
(Scottsdale, AZ) stationery, welcoming RN
to Arizona, conveying regrets at not being
able to attend that evening's rally. 1 pg (front
and back). 2 pgs scanned.
4
11
n.d.
Other Document
Casa Blanca Inn (Scottsdale, AZ) envelope
from a "Billy" (possibly Billy Graham) to
RN. Handwritten note above address area
indicates "RN Called". 1 pg.
4
11
n.d.
Book
Photocopied book excerpt to Rose Woods,
sender unknown. Excerpted pages
alternately titled "An Analysis of Growth"
and "The Growths of Civilizations". Covers
ancient philosophers, religious figures. 15
pgs total (cover + excerpt). 15 pgs scanned.
4
11
05/14/1974
Letter
Card from unknown to RN. 2 pgs.
4
11
N.D.
Other Document
Envelope for RN. Sender unknown. 1 pg.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Page 1 of 1
THE
president
5/3/74
Casa Blanca Inn Friday 2 p.m.
SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA
Dear Mr. Prosident -
Welcome to Arigona! I request ? Comet the Lone
to the rolly tonght but I am address Exation
Club and the boden g our Crumble that begins
Sunly at Arigona State United felt strongly that
should not get the Crumb involved in a politied mety.
on Committee and backen are vole of of botl Republ
and Domocrota Also the Clergy who invoted me have are
Very sensitie about the whole thing. for for their plans could
be put in jamphy.
Howeb if the is on offertate to see you or tall to
you on the phone qwall Walme it.
1 tial to Call you on to phone the other mist ofter
You speed but call ret get think the switch band.
1 don't have to till you the (019) milling are program fr you.
The fit Usne of sciple my on ther gove me when 7
become a was" Trut in the Loul with all they heat
and Leon not to thy own remberstanding In all thy Way
Hair and He shall direct the poths" 3:5-6.
This Vene applier to You now! Put you that in the
Lond, my find He Will mar it you down!
Mg Frinkly in at tordel to you in Oth. live
Sol Blen You and my love To Pat -
Bill
My Printe phone in 946-3550
and
help
Rx Called
Casa Blanca Inn
SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA
The Preside
Private
To: Rose woods
THE PRESIDENT HAS SEEN addition
A
for Gn ty
AN ANALYSIS OF GROWTH
217
(2) WITHDRAWAL AND RETURN: INDIVIDUALS
In the last section we have studied the course which is followed
by creative personalities when they are taking the mystic path
which is their highest spiritual level. We have seen that they pass
first out of action into ecstasy and then out of ecstasy into action
on a new and higher plane. In using such language we describe
the creative movement in terms of the personality's psychic
experience. In terms of his external relations with the society to
which he belongs we shall be describing the same duality of move-
ment if we call it withdrawal and return. The withdrawal makes
it possible for the personality to realize powers within himself
which might have remained dormant if he had not been released
for the time being from his social toils and trammels. Such a
withdrawal may be a voluntary action on his part or it may be
forced upon him by circumstances beyond his control; in either
case the withdrawal is an opportunity, and perhaps a necessary
condition, for the anchorite's transf. uration; 'anchorite', in the
original Greek, means literally 'one who goes apart'; but a trans-
figuration in solitude can have no purpose, and perhaps even no
meaning, except as a prelude to the return of the transfigured per-
sonality into the social milieu out of which he had originally come:
a native environment from which the human SC ial animal cannot
permanently estrange himself without repudiating his humanity
and becoming, in Aristotle's phrase, 'cither a beast or a god'. The
return is the essence of the whole movement as well as its final
cause.
This is apparent in the Syriac myth of Moses' solitary ascent
of Mount Sinai. Moses ascends the mountain in order to com-
mune with Yahweh at Yahweh's call; and the call is to Moses
alone, while the rest of the Children of Israel are charged to keep
their distance. Yet Yahweh's whole purpose in calling Moses up
is to send him down again as the bearer of a new law which Moses
is to communicate to the rest of the people because they are in-
capable of coming up and receiving the communication themselves.
'And Moses went up unto God; and the Lord called unto him out
of the mountain, saying: "Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob
and tell the Children of Israel.'
And he gave unto Moses, when
he had made an end of communing with him upon Mount Sinai, two
tables of testimony
written with the finger of God."
The emphasis upon the return is equally strong in the account
of the prophetic experience and the prophetic mission given by
1 Exodus xix. 3 and xxxi. 18. See ch. xix, passim.
218
THE GROWTHS OF CIVILIZATIONS
the Arabic philosopher Ibn Khaldün in the fourteenth century
of the Christian Era:
'The human soul has an innate disposition to divest itself of its
human nature in order to clothe itself in the nature of the angels and
to become an angel in reality for a single instant of time-a moment
which comes and goes as swiftly as the flicker of an evelid. Thereupon
the soul resumes its human nature, after having received, in the world
of angels, a message which it has to carry to its own human kind."
In this philosophic interpretation of the Islamic doctrine of
prophecy we seem to catch an echo of a famous passage of Hellenic
philosophy: Plato's simile of the Cave. In this passage Plato
likens the ordinary run of mankind to prisoners in a cave, standing
with their backs to the light and gazing at shadows cast upon a
screen by the realities which are moving about behind them.
The prisoners take it for granted that the shadows which they see
on the back wall of the cave are the ultimate realities, since these
are the only things that they have ever been able to see. Plato
then imagines a single prisoner being suddenly released and com-
pelled to turn round and face the light and walk out into the open.
The first result of this re-orientation of vision is that the liberated
prisoner is dazzled and confused. But not for long; for the faculty
of vision is already in him and his eyes gradually inform him of
the nature of the real world. He is then sent back to his cave
again; and he is just as much dazzled and confused by the twilight
now as he was by the sunlight before. As he formerly regretted his
translation into the sunlight, so he now regrets his re-translation
into the twilight, and with better reason; for in returning to his
old companions in the cave who have never seen the sunlight he
will be exposed to the risk of a hostile reception.
"There will assuredly be laughter at his expense, and it will be said
of him that the only result of his escapade up there is that he has come
back with his eyesight ruined. Moral: it is a fool's game even to make
the attempt to go up aloft; "and as for the busybody who goes in for
all this liberating and translating to higher spheres, if ever we have a
chance to catch him and kill him, we will certainly take it".'
Readers of Robert Browning's poetry may be reminded at this
point of his fantasy of Lazarus. He imagines that Lazarus, who
was raised from the dead four days after his death, must have
returned to 'the cave' a very different man from what he was
before he left it, and he embodies a description of this same
Lazarus of Bethany, in old age, forty years after his unique
experience, in An Epistle of one Karshish, a travelling Arabian
1 Ibn Khaldun: Muqaddamãt, French translation by Baron M. de Slane,
vol. ii, p. 437.
AN ANALYSIS OF GROWTH
219
physician who writes periodical reports for the information of the
head of his firm. According to Karshish the villagers of Bethany
can make nothing of poor Lazarus; he has come to be regarded as
a quite harmless variety of the village idiot. But Karshish has
heard Lazarus's story, and is not so sure.
Browning's Lazarus failed to make his 'return' in any effective
shape; he became neither a prophet nor a martyr, but suffered the
returning Platonic philosopher's less exacting alternative fate of
being tolerated but ignored. Plato himself has painted the ordeal
of the return in such unattractive colours that it is almost surprising
to find him imposing it remorselessly on his elect philosophers.
But if it is essential to the Platonic system that the elect should
acquire philosophy, it is equally essential that they should not
remain philosophers only. The purpose and meaning of their
enlightenment is that they should become philosopher-kings.
The path which Plato lays down for them is unmistakably identical
with the path that has been trodden by the Christian mystics.
Yet, while the path is identical, the spirit in which it is traversed
by the Hellenic and by the Christian soul is not the same. Plato
takes it for granted that the personal interest, as well as the personal
desire, of the liberated and enlightened philosopher must be in
opposition to the interest of the mass of his fellow men who still
'sit in darkness and in the shadow of death
fast bound in
misery and iron'.' Whatever may be the interests of the prisoners,
the philosopher, on Plato's showing, cannot minister to the needs
of mankind without sacrificing his own happiness and his own
perfection. For, when once he has attained enlightenment, the
best thing for the philosopher himself is to remain in the light
outside the cave and live there happy ever after. It was indeed a
fundamental tenet of Hellenic philosophy that the best state of
life is the state of contemplation-the Greek word for which has
become our English word 'theory' which we habitually use as the
opposite of 'practice'. The life of contemplation is placed by
Pythagoras above the life of action, and this doctrine runs through
the whole Hellenic philosophical tradition down to the Neo-
platonists living in the latest age of the Hellenic Society in its
dissolution. Plato affects to believe that his philosophers will
consent to take a hand in the work of the world from a sheer sense
of duty, but in fact they did not; and their refusal may be part of
the explanation of the problem why the breakdown which the
Hellenic Civilization had suffered in the generation before Plato was
never retrieved. The reason why 'the great refusal' was made by
the Hellenic philosophers is also clear. Their moral limitation was
8
Psalin cvii. 10.
220
THE GROWTHS OF CIVILIZATIONS
the consequence of an error in belief. Believing that the ecstasy
and not the return was the be-all and end-all of the spiritual
Odyssey on which they had embarked, they saw nothing but a
sacrifice on the altar of duty in the painful passage from ecstasy
to return which was really the purpose and culmination of the
movement in which they were engaged. Their mystical experience
lacked the cardinal Christian virtue of love which inspires the
Christian mystic to pass direct from the heights of communion to
the slums, moral and material, of the unredeemed workaday world.
This movement of Withdrawal-and-Return is not a peculiarity
of human life which is only to be observed in the relations of
human beings with their fellows. It is something that is character-
istic of life in general, and becomes manifest to man in the life of
the plants as soon as he has made this plant life his concern by
taking up agriculture-a phenomenon which has led the human
imagination to express human hopes and fears in agricultural
terms. The annual withdrawal and return of the corn has been
translated into anthropomorphic terms in ritual and mythology,
as witness the rape and restoration of a Korê or Persephonê, or the
death and resurrection of a Dionysus, Adonis, Osiris or whatever
may be the local name for the universal corn-spirit or year-god,
whose ritual and myth, with the same stock characters playing the
same tragic drama under diverse names, is as widespread as the
practice of agriculture itself.
Similarly, the human imagination has found an allegory of
human life in the phenomena of withdrawal and return apparent
in the life of plants, and in terms of this allegory it has wrestled
with the problem of death, a problem which begins to torment
human minds from the moment when, in growing civilizations,
the higher personalities begin to disengage themselves from the
mass of mankind.
'Some men will say: "How are the dead raised up? and with what
body do they come?'
"Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die;
'And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall
be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat or of some other grain;
'But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed
his own body
'So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it
is raised in incorruption;
'It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness,
it is raised in power;
'It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.
'And so it is written: "The first man Adam was made a living soul;
the last Adam was made a quickening spirit."
AN ANALYSIS OF GROWTH
221
"The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord
from Heaven."
In this passage of the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians
four ideas are presented in a succession which is also a crescendo.
The first idea is that we are witnessing a resurrection when we
behold the return of the corn in the spring after its withdrawal
in the autumn. The second idea is that the resurrection of the
corn is an earnest of the resurrection of dead human beings: a
reaffirmation of a doctrine taught long before in the Hellenic
Mysteries. The third idea is that the resurrection of human beings
is possible and conceivable in virtue of some kind of transfigura-
tion which their natures undergo through the act of God during
the time of waiting that has to intervene between their death and
their return to life. The earnest of this transfiguration of dead.
human beings is the manifest transfiguration of seeds into flowers
and fruits. This change in human nature is to be a change in the
direction of greater endurance, beauty, power and spirituality.
The fourth idea in the passage is the last and most sublime. In
the concept of the First and Second Man the problem of death
is forgotten and the concern for the resurrection of the individual
human being is momentarily transcended. In the advent of 'the
Second Man who is the Lord from Heaven' Paul hail- the creation
of a new species composed of one unique individual, the Adjutor
Dei whose mission it is to raise the rest of mankind to a super-
human level by inspiring his fellow men with his own inspiration
from God.
Thus the same motif of withdrawal and transfiguration leading
up to a return in glory and power can be discerned in the spiritual
experience of mysticism and in the physical life of the vegetable
world and in human speculations on death and immortality and
in the creation of a higher out of a lower species. This is evidently
a theme of cosmic range; and it has furnished one of the primordial
images of mythology, which is an intuitive form of apprehending
and expressing universal truths.
One mythical variant of the motif is the story of the foundling.
A babe born to a royal heritage is cast away in infancy-sometimes
(as in the stories of Oedipus and Perseus) by his own father or
grandfather, who is warned by a dream or an oracle that the child
is destined to supplant him; sometimes (as in the story of Romulus)
by a usurper, who has supplanted the babe's father and fears lest
the babe should grow up to avenge him; and sometimes (as in
the stories of Jason, Orestes, Zeus, Horus, Moses and Cyrus)
by friendly hands that are concerned to save the babe from the
I I Corinthians XV. 35-8, 42-5, 47.
222
THE GROWTHS OF CIVILIZATIONS
villain's murderous designs. In the next stage of the story the
infant castaway is miraculously saved alive, and in the third and
last chapter the child of destiny, now grown to manhood and
wrought to a heroic temper by the hardships through which he
has passed, returns in power and glory to enter into his kingdom.
In the story of Jesus the Withdrawal-and-Return motif perpe-
tually recurs. Jesus is the babe born to a royal heritage-a scion of
David or a son of God Himself-who is cast away in infancy. He
comes down from Heaven to be born on Earth; He is born in
David's own city of Bethlehem, yet finds no room in the inn and
has to be laid in a manger, like Moses in his ark or Perseus in his
chest. In the stable He is watched over by friendly animals, as
Romulus is watched over by a wolf and Cyrus by a hound; He
also receives the ministrations of shepherds, and is reared by a
foster-father of humble birth, like Romulus and Cyrus and
Oedipus. Thereafter He is saved from Herod's murderous design
by being taken away privily to Egypt, as Moses is saved from
Pharaoh's murderous design by being hidden in the bulrushes,
and as Jason is placed beyond the reach of King Pelias by being
hidden in the fastnesses of Mount Pelion. And then at the end of
the story Jesus returns, as the other heroes re urn, to enter into
His Kingdom. He enters into the Kingdom of Judah when,
riding into Jerusalem, He is hailed by the multitudes as the Son
of David. He enters into the Kingdom of Heaven in the Ascension.
In all this the story of Jesus conforms to the common pattern
of the tale of the foundling babe, but in the Gospels the under-
lying motif of Withdrawal-and-Return presents itself in other
shapes as well. It is present in each one of the successive spiritual
experiences in which the divinity of Jesus is progressively revealed.
When Jesus becomes conscious of His mission, upon His baptism
by John, He withdraws into the wilderness for forty days and
returns from His Temptation there in the power of the spirit.
Thereafter, when Jesus realizes that His mission is to lead to
His death, He withdraws again into the 'high mountain apart'
which is the scene of His Transfiguration, and returns from this
experience resigned and resolved to die. Thereafter, again, when
He duly suffers the death of mortal man in the Crucifixion, He
descends into the tomb in order to rise immortal in the Resur-
rection. And last of all, in the Ascension, He withdraws from
Earth to Heaven in order to 'come again with glory to judge both
the quick and the dead: whose Kingdom shall have no end'.
These crucial recurrences of the Withdrawal-and-Return motif
in the story of Jesus likewise have their parallels. The withdrawal
into the wilderness reproduces Moses' flight into Midian; the
AN ANALYSIS OF GROWTH
223
Transfiguration on a 'high mountain apart' reproduces Moses'
transfiguration on Mount Sinai; the death and resurrection of a
divine being is anticipated in the Hellenic Mysteries; the tremen-
dous figure which is to appear and dominate the scene, at the
catastrophe which is to bring to an end the present mundane
order, is anticipated in the Zoroastrian mythology in the figure of
the Saviour and in the Jewish mythology in the figures of the
Messiah and 'the Son of Man'. There is, however, one feature
of the Christian mythology which seems to have no precedent;
and that is the interpretation of the future coming of the Saviour
or Messiah as the future return to Earth of an historical figure
who had already lived on Earth as a human being. In this flash of
intuition the timeless past of the foundling myth and the timeless
present of the agrarian ritual are translated into the historical
striving of mankind to reach the goal of human endeavour. In
the concept of the Second Coming the motif of Withdrawal-and-
Return attains its deepest spiritual meaning.
The flash of intuition in which the Christian concept of the
Second Coming was conceived must evidently have been the
response to a particular challenge of the time and place, and the critic
who makes the mistake of supposing that things have nothing more
in them than is to be found in their origins will depreciate this
Christian doctrine on the ground that it originated in a disappoint-
ment: the disappointment of the primitive Christian community
when they realized that their Master had actually come and gone
without the looked-for result. He had been put to death, and, as
far as could be seen, His death had left His followers without
prospects. If they were to find heart to carry on their Master's
mission, they must draw the sting of failure from their Master's
career by projecting this career from the past into the future;
they must preach that He was to come again in power and
glory.
It is, indeed, true that this doctrine of a Second Coming has since
been adopted by other communities that have been in the same
disappointed or frustrated state of mind. In the myth of the
Second Coming of Arthur, for example, the vanquished Britons
consoled themselves for the failure of the historic Arthur to avert
the ultimate victory of the English barbarian invaders. In the
myth of the Second Coming of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa
(A.D. 1152-90) the Germans of the later Middle Ages consoled
themselves for their failure to maintain their hegemony over
Western Christendom.
'To the south-west of the green plain that girdles in the rock of
Salzburg, the gigantic mass of the Untersberg frowns over the road
224
THE GROWTHS OF CIVILIZATIONS
which winds up a long defile to the glen and lake of Berchtesgaden.
There, far up among its limestone crags, in a spot scarcely accessible
to human foot, the peasants of the valley point out to the traveller the
black mouth of a cavern and tell him that, within, Barbarossa lies amid
his knights in an enchanted sleep, waiting the hour when the ravens
shall cease to hover round the peak and the pear-tree blossom in the
valley, to descend with his Crusaders and bring back to Germany the
golden age of peace and strength and unity."
Similarly the Shi'ite community in the Muslim World, when
they had lost their battle and become a persecuted sect, conceived
the idea that the Twelfth Imãm (twelfth lineal descendant of
'Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet) had not died but had dis-
appeared into a cave from which he continued to provide spiritual
and temporal guidance for his people, and that one day he would
reappear as the promised Mahdi and bring the long reign of
tyranny to an end.
But if we turn our attention again to the doctrine of the Second
Coming in its classic Christian exposition, we shall see that it
is really a mythological projection into the future, in physical
imagery, of the spiritual return in which the Apostles' vanquished
Master reasserted His presence in the Apostles' hearts, when the
Apostles took heart of grace to execute, in spite of the Master's
physical departure, that audacious mission which the Master had
once laid upon them. This creative revival of the Apostles' courage
and faith, after a moment of disillusionment and despair, is
described in the Acts-again in mythological language-in the
image of the descent of the Holy Ghost on the Day of Pente-
cost.
After this attempt to grasp what Withdrawal-and-Return really
means, we are in a better position to take an empirical survey of its
working in human history through the interaction of creative
personalities and creative minorities with their fellow human
beings. There are famous historical examples of the movement
in many different walks of life. We shall encounter it in the lives
of mystics and saints and statesmen and soldiers and historians
and philosophers and poets, as well as in the histories of nations
and states and churches. Walter Bagehot expressed the truth we
are seeking to establish when he wrote: 'All the great nations have
been prepared in privacy and in secret. They have been composed
far away from all distraction.'
We will now pass rapidly in review a diversity of examples,
beginning with creative individuals.
1
Bryce, James: The Holy Roman Empire, ch. xi, ad fin.
2
Bagehot, W.: Physics and Politics, 10th ed., p. 214.
AN ANALYSIS OF GROWTH
225
Saint Paul
Paul of Tarsus was born into Jewry in a generation when the
impact of Hellenism upon the Syriac Society was presenting a
challenge which could not be evaded. In the first phase of his
career he persecuted the Jewish followers of Jesus who were
guilty, in Jewish Zealot eyes, of making a breach in the Jewish
community's ranks. In the latter part of his career he turned his
energies in an entirely different direction, preaching a new dispen-
sation 'where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor
uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free',' and preaching
this reconciliation in the name of the sect which he had formerly
persecuted. This last chapter was the creative chapter of Paul's
career; the first chapter was a false start; and between the two
chapters a great gulf was fixed. After his sudden enlightenment
on the road to Damascus, Paul 'conferred not with flesh and
blood' but went into the desert of Arabia. Not until three years
later did he visit Jerusalem and meet the original Apostles with
a view to resuming practical activity.2
Saint Benedict
The life of Benedict of Nursia (circa A.D. 480-543) was con-
temporary with the death-throes of the Hellenic Society. Sent as
a child from his Umbrian home to Rome in order to receive the
traditional upper-class education in the humanities, he revolted
from the life of the capital and withdrew into the wilderness at
this early age. For three years he lived in utter solitude; but the
turning-point of his career was his return to social life upon
reaching manhood, when he consented to become the head of a
monastic community: first in the valley of Subiaco and afterwards
on Monte Cassino. In this last creative chapter of his career the
saint improvised a new education to take the place of the obsolete
system that he himself had rejected as a child, and the Benedictine
community on Monte Cassino became the mother of monasteries
which increased and multiplied until they had spread the Bene-
dictine Rule to the uttermost parts of the West. Indeed this rule
was one of the main foundations of the new social structure which
was eventually raised in Western Christendom on the ruins of the
ancient Hellenic order.
One of the most important features in Benedict's rule was the
prescription of manual labour; for this meant, first and foremost,
agricultural labour in the fields. The Benedictine movement was,
on the economic plane, an agricultural revival: the first successful
1 Colossians iii. 22.
2
Galatians i. 15-18.
226
THE GROWTHS OF CIVILIZATIONS
revival of agriculture in Italy since the destruction of the Italian
peasant economy in the Hannibalic War. The Benedictine Rule
achieved what had never been achieved by the Gracchan agrarian
laws or the Imperial alimenta, because it worked, not, as state
action works, from above downwards, but from below upwards,
by evoking the individual's initiative through enlisting his religious
enthusiasm. By virtue of this spiritual élan the Benedictine Order
not only turned the tide of economic life in Italy; it also performed
in medieval Transalpine Europe that strenuous pioneer work of
clearing forests, draining marshes and creating fields and pastures
which was performed in North America by the French and
British backwoodsmen.
Saint Gregory the Great
Some thirty years after the death of Benedict, Gregory, holding
the office of Praefectus Urbi in Rome, found himself faced with
an impossible task. The city of Rome in A.D. 573 was in much the
same predicament as the city of Vienna in A.D. 1920. A great city,
which had become what it was in virtue of having been for centuries
the capital of a great empire, now suddenly found itself cut off
from its former provinces, deprived of its historic functions and
thrown back on its own resources. In the year of Gregory's
prefecture, the Ager Romanus was restricted approximately to the
area which it had occupied some nine centuries back, before the
Romans had embarked on their struggle with the Samnites for
the mastery of Italy, but the territory which had then to support
a little market-town had now to support a vast parasitic capital.
The impotence of the old order to deal with the new state of affairs
must have been borne in upon the mind of a Roman magnate who
held the Praefectura Urbis at this time, and this painful experi-
ence would fully account for Gregory's complete withdrawal from
the secular world two years later.
His withdrawal, like Paul's, was of three years' duration, and
at the end of that period he was planning to undertake in person
the mission that he afterwards undertook by proxy, for the con-
version of the heathen English, when he was recalled to Rome
by the Pope. Here, in various ecclesiastical offices and finally
on the Papal throne itself (A.D. 590-604), he accomplished three
great tasks. He reorganized the administration of the estates of
the Roman Church in Italy and overseas; he negotiated a settle-
ment between the Imperial authorities in Italy and the Lombard
invaders; and he laid the foundations of a new empire for Rome
in the place of her old empire which now lay in ruins-a new
Roman Empire, established by missionary zeal and not by military
AN ANALYSIS OF GROWTH
227
force, which was eventually to conquer new worlds whose soil the
legions had never trodden and whose very existence had never
been suspected by the Scipios and Caesars.
The Buddha
Siddhärtha Gautama the Buddha was born into the Indic World
in its time of troubles. He lived to see his native city state
Kapilavastu sacked and his Sakyan kinsmen massacred. The
small aristocratic republics of the early Indic World, of which the
Sakyan community was one, appear to have been succumbing in
Gautama's generation to rising autocratic monarchies built on a
larger scale. Gautama was born a Sakya aristocrat at a moment
when the aristocratic order was being challenged by new social
forces. Gautama's personal retort to this challenge was to re-
nounce a world which was becoming inhospitable to aristocrats
of his ancestral kind. For seven years he sought enlightenment
through ever-increasing asceticism. It was not until he had taken
the first step towards returning to the world by breaking his fast
that the light broke in upon him. And then, after he had attained
the light for himself, he spent the rest of his life in imparting it
to his fellow human beings. In order to impart it effectively, he
allowed a company of disciples to gather round him and thus
became the centre and head of a fraternity.
Muhammad
Muhammad was born into the Arabian external proletariat of
the Roman Empire in an age when the relations between the
Empire and Arabia were coming to a crisis. At the turn of the
sixth and seventh centuries of the Christian Era the saturation-
point had been reached in the impregnation of Arabia with cultural
influences from the Empire. Some reaction from Arabia, in the
form of a counter-discharge of energy, was bound to ensue; it
was the career of Muhammad (whose lifetime was circa A.D.
570-632) that decided the form that this reaction was to take; and
a movement of Withdrawal-and-Return was the prelude to each
of the two crucial new departures upon which Muhammad's life-
history hinges.
There were two features in the social life of the Roman Empire
in Muhammad's day that would make a particularly deep im-
pression on the w..nd of an Arabian observer because, in Arabia,
they were both conspicuous by their absence. The first of these
features was monotheism in religion. The second was law and
order in government. Muhammad's life-work consisted in trans-
lating each of these elements in the social fabric of 'Rum' into an
228
THE GROWTHS OF CIVILIZATIONS
Arabian vernacular version and incorporating both his Arabianized
monotheism and his Arabianized imperium into a single master
institution-the all-embracing institution of Islam-to which he
succeeded in imparting such titanic driving-force that the new
dispensation, which had been designed by its author to meet the
needs of the barbarians of Arabia, burst the bounds of the penin-
sula and captivated the entire Syriac World from the shores of the
Atlantic to the coasts of the Eurasian Steppe.
This life-work, upon which Muhammad appears to have em-
barked in about his fortieth year (circa A.D. 609), was achieved in
two stages. In the first of these stages Muhammad was concerned
exclusively with his religious mission; in the second stage the
religious mission was overlaid, and almost overwhelmed, by the
political enterprise. Muhammad's original entry upon a purely
religious mission was a sequel to his return to the parochial life
of Arabia after a partial withdrawal of some fifteen years' duration
into the life of a caravan-trader between the Arabian oases and the
Syrian desert-ports of the Roman Empire along the fringes of the
North Arabian Steppe. The second, or politico-religious, stage in
Muhammad's career was inaugurated by the Prophet's withdrawal
or Hegira (Hijrah) from his native oasis of Mecca to the rival oasis
of Yathrib, thenceforth known par excellence as Medina: 'the
City' (of the Prophet). In the Hijrah, which has been recognized
by Muslims as such a crucial event that it has been adopted as
the inaugural date of the Islamic Era, Muhammad left Mecca as
a hunted fugitive. After a seven years' absence (A.D. 622-9) he
returned to Mecca, not as an amnestied exile, but as lord and
master of half Arabia.
Machiavelli
Machiavelli (A.D. 1469-1527) was a citizen of Florence who was
twenty-five years old when Charles VIII of France crossed the
Alps and overran Italy with a French army in 1494. He thus
belonged to a generation which was just old enough to have
known Italy as she had been during her age of immunity from
'barbarian invasions'; and he lived long enough to see the peninsula
become the international arena for trials of strength between
sundry Transalpine or Transmarine Powers which found the prize
and the symbol of their alternating victories in snatching from
one another's grasp an oppressive hegemony over the once
independent Italian city-states. This impact upon Italy of non-
Italian Powers was the challenge which the generation of Machia-
velli had to encounter and the experience through which they
had to live; and the experience was the more difficult for the
AN ANALYSIS OF GROWTH
229
Italians of this generation to meet inasmuch as it was one which
had not been tasted, either by them or by their forefathers, for
the best part of two-and-a-half centuries.
Machiavelli was endowed by nature with consummate political
ability; he had an insatiable zest for exercising his talents. Fortune
had made him a citizen of Florence, one of the leading city-states
of the peninsula, and merit won him, at the age of twenty-nine,
the post of Secretary to the Government. Appointed to this
important office in 1498, four years after the first French invasion,
he acquired a first-hand knowledge of the new 'barbarian' Powers
in the course of his official duties. After fourteen years of this
experience he had become perhaps better qualified than any other
living Italian for taking a hand in the urgent task of helping Italy
to work out her political salvation, when a turn in the wheel of
Florentine domestic politics suddenly expelled him from his field
of practical activity. In 1512 he was deprived of his Secretaryship
of State and in the following year he suffered imprisonment and
torture; and, although he was lucky enough to emerge again alive,
the price which he had to pay for his release from prison was a
perpetual rustication on his farm in the Florentine countryside.
The break in his career was complete; yet, in putting him to the
proof of this tremendous personal challenge, Fortune did not find
Machiavelli wanting in the power to make an effective response.
In a letter written very shortly after his rustication to a friend
and former colleague he describes in detail and with an almost
humorous detachment the manner of life which he has now
mapped out for himself. Rising with the sun, he devotes himself
during the hours of daylight to the humdrum social and sporting
activities suitable to the manner of life now forced upon him.
But that is not the end of his day.
'When the evening comes I return to the house and go into my study;
and at the door I take off my country clothes, all caked with mud and
slime, and put on court dress; and when I am thus decently re-clad I
enter into the ancient mansions of the men of ancient days. And there
I am received by my hosts with all lovingkindness, and I feast myself
on that food which alone is my true nourishment, and which I was
born for.'
In these hours of scholarly research and meditation was con-
ceived and written The Prince; and the concluding chapter of the
famous treatise, which is an Exhortation to liberate Italy from the
Barbarians', reveals the intention that Machiavelli had in mind
when he took TP his pen to write. He was addressing himself
once more to the one vital problem of contemporary Italian
statesmanship in the hope that perhaps, even now, he might help
230
THE GROWTHS OF CIVILIZATIONS
to bring that problem to solution by transmuting into creative
thought the energies which had been deprived of their practical
outlet.
In fact, of course, the political hope that animates The Prince
was utterly disappointed. The book failed to achieve its author's
immediate aim; but this is not to say that The Prince was a failure,
for the pursuit of practical politics by literary means was not the
essence of the business which Machiavelli was going about when,
evening after evening in his remote farm-house, he entered into
the mansions of the men of ancient days. hrough his writings
Machiavelli was able to return to the world on a more etherial
plane, on which his effect on the world has been vastly greater
than the highest possible achievement of a Florentine Secretary of
State immersed in the details of practical politics. In those magic
hours of catharsis when he rose above his vexation of spirit
Machiavelli succeeded in transmuting his practical energies into
a series of mighty intéllectual works-The Prince, The Discourses
on Livy, The Art of War and The History of Florence-which have
been the seeds of our modern Western political philosophy.
Dante
Two hundred years earlier the history of the same city furnished
a curiously parallel example. For Dante did not accomplish his
life-work till he had been driven to withdraw from his native city.
In Florence, Dante fell in love with Beatrice, only to see. her die
before him, still the wife of another man. In Florence he went
into politics only to be sentenced to exile, an exile from which
he never returned. Yet, in losing his birthright in Florence, Dante
was to win the citizenship of the world; for in exile the genius
which had been crossed in politics after being crossed in love found
its life-work in creating the Divina Commedia.
President Richard M. Nixon
A
TOTAL
grant me
the Serenity
to accept the things
cannot change,
Courage to change
the things I can,A
And Missom. to 2X
know the difference.
President Richard M. Nixon