Sub Specie Æternitatis

SINCE the beginning of the war, thoughtful people — and I have in view primarily Americans as deeply interested neutrals — have grieved by day and in the waking hours of the night over the destruction of young and ardent life and of so much that was costly and beautiful. Will this unspeakable coil of death and ruin ever remove from our minds or be forgotten? Alas for the enormous play of hate, for the misdirection of ideals, for the world fallen in ethical pitfalls! Alas for the fatal patriotism of millions upon millions of beings so tragically mistaken! Alas for the failure to see life whole — all proportion lost in a state of ira which is brevis furor!

Our own lives are made to seem so small. How quickly would we offer them to stop the ruin! One is confused. Does the war necessitate an entire reconsideration of life? Before now, men have thought much; and we are still thinking. Are there no principles, slowly won from universal experience through age-long reflection, that will meet the storm?

Let us not be caught by bulk. The bigness of the war does not establish its significance. All subsequent history has proved the lasting import of Marathon — a little battle — and of Salamis. Although we cannot accept as permanently valid the declarations and assurances of those whose minds are now strained by their belligerency, their children’s children will recognize whatever may prove to be the true importance of this war. At present no one can foresee wherein that will lie. This war obviously dwarfs other wars in the number of fighters, and in the altogether modern prodigiousness of the economic and social, as well as military, organization, which makes possible the fighting of such numbers; also in the new marvels of physical science applied likewise to the ends of slaughter. Possibly one great result may lie in the very demonstration of this universal organization, economic, military, scientific, and in the pregnant suggestion as to how the same hereafter may be turned to some human good. Moreover, for the time, the war has increased the world’s energy by drawing out an unrealized total of devotion and self-sacrifice, which thus may be proved and made ready for employment in some clearer enlargement and ennoblement of life.

Therein lies the test. Is this war (seemingly a huge stupidity) adding to the fundamentals of life, as eminent individuals have done: scientific inventors who have facilitated physical comfort and convenience, or the far greater men who have increased the spiritual wealth of mankind? Is this world-war to have as deep an effect as Buddha, as Plato, as Jesus? One does not measure the significance of men by tons or acres, nor that of events by the noise of the concussion. The fine thought may have more lasting import than the death of ten thousand men in battle.

As for ourselves, thoughtful people who do not cease to grieve while doing what we may to relieve some infinitesimal part of the sufferings of those to whom our hearts are knit, perhaps we are entitled to some private peace of mind, which is not to be gained by turning our thoughts from the stupendous calamity. We are swung between unappeasable grief and the vague hopes which we are forced to visualize, so as not to despair. Consolation lies in the apparent fact that our grief has to do largely with temporal conditions, while our hopes seek to establish themselves in eternal validities. For any stable calm, the great calamity must be viewed unflinchingly. One must also look around, above, and beneath it. We must frame the conflict in larger universals, which shall span its struggling contraries and even render audible the transcendent harmony issuing from these warring opposites.

One needs faith for this final intellectual peace of contemplation; faith in the laws of life working through the tumult; faith not to worry lest the outcome shall not be just. Let no one think that he could arrange the outcome more wisely than it will adjust itself. If life is not always obviously just in its awards, it is wise beyond the imaginings of men. For it regards and makes account of the infinite web of forces which escape us; it utilizes them all, and through this measureless interrelated means, moves on along its allconsidering progress.

Justice is but a part. Long ago Plato taught those who would learn, that the unjust man does not benefit by his injustice, but will be injured by it as by disease; will be made worse, he himself. Here still is truth. But if the mind will span the present crisis, broader, more universal thoughts are called for, in which justice shall join with its apparently evil opposite, and the two move on in some high harmony.

Consider God, or the Sum of Power making for the coherence of the Universe, and incidentally for the checkered progress marking the record of the world we live in. The life-giving, renewing, plastic Power, or the omnipotent God, if God it be, is the God or Power of that which apparently is baneful, as well as of that which is more apparently benign: God or Power of the earthquake and the typhus-germ, and of all red-fanged nature. He or It is God or Power of the grasping, destroying, bloody ways of men, as well as of their beneficent purposes. History, both in the large and in the small, as well as we can read it, shows might triumphant, outwardly if not inwardly; lustful, grasping, destructive, arriving might — the might which arrives. Again and again the industry and freedom of small innocent groups have been crushed by superior force. Power in action is apt to destroy. Much of mankind’s apparent progress has come independently of moral purpose, has arisen from selfish strife, and even from the triumph of the unjust cause, as it would seem.

The merely moral is not the only good! Righteousness is not the only virtue! Love is not all, justice is not all, charity, patience, humility, these are not all. It may be that in some future consummation — in the Kingdom of Heaven if one will — there is place for the fruits of wickedness, sobeit that they were begotten of power. Indeed, he who has lived out his threescore years has discovered in his own progressing selfhood, that life’s whole does not lie in gladness or in sorrow only, or in duty only, or in reaching or renouncing the heart’s desire, or in accomplishing the beheld achievement of the mind; but perhaps in all of these, and in much besides that seemed unrelated to any good, but rather connected with palpable lapses.

Out of apparent evil, as well as out of good, life constantly advances. The horror of this world-war need not affect our faith in the purposes of God working good out of apparent evil; or, if one will, our faith in the triumphant vitality of nature and of man. There is no reason why we should not still hold fast to God, or to the eternal life-giving and restoring Power, being assured that not merely physical renewal, but some spiritual regeneration shall emerge from this cataclysm. Specifically we may still believe that the elements of culture which are not dead, but living, will renew themselves. Enough has occurred already to raise such hope to a conviction, that the suffering, fighting lands shall be benefited and renewed, each according to its need. Perhaps, in them, war will purge patriotism of its grosser parts. The danger is rather for prosperous neutral countries, lest they gain nothing where they have made no sacrifice. Yet the war may purge some of their citizens of small selfishness, and help a few to the knowledge which is understanding, which is sympathy, which is love: chi più cognosce più ama.

Besides the calm which comes through thought, peace may drop on the heart unexpectedly, as if straight from God’s mercy. Many months ago, the fall of Antwerp was to me as the death of Bathsheba’s child. I rose and returned to peace and work, after that great grief. The Greeks recognized a like peace flowing from the tragic catharsis.

Thus in two ways, which often seem to join, the way of thought and the sudden lift of feeling, one gains peace. ‘For we know that to them who love God, all things work together for good.’ Well for those who may know and feel this! For them, hate cannot triumph, nor the power of love be thwarted. But all of us can pass out beyond anxiety, through consideration of the everlasting stars and the eternal ways of the Universe which holds us all. The tragedy of our own generation may be seen set in the cycle of universal law, cause and effect, unending, infinite. What shall shatter the refuge of such consideration ?

And as for concrete intruding disquietudes and sorrows, — I do not refer to closer personal anguish, — why not cry as Joinville to his knights beset by Moslem: ‘Let us whoop after this canaille, and sometime we shall be glad, telling of it in our ladies’ chambers’? Or say with Æneas speaking in the storm to his companions, ‘Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit’ ?