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Priests to Each Other
by Carlyle Marney

Introduction: The Christian Genius

It is a very great thing--after a long dry spell, when your ideas are so shriveled that you begin to suspect the futility of the whole modern journey; all institutions seem suspect to you, all values moldy; and the work of your life is threatened with meaninglessness to come across a sudden and great justification that sends you back to the wars.

It is a very humbling, even humiliating, thing suddenly to discover, years after you had published, that your most serious attempt and a fundamental judgment your work rests on now need radical correction.1 It is embarrassing to confess that you had suspected this, had tried to allow for it, but had not taken your hunch seriously enough. (Anyone who is operating theologically as he did fifteen years ago is probably inept and irrelevant.) However, if you admit this need for correction, it may mean a break through your own crust to some primal ground. It will be a chance to modify an error, and it may very well be your discovery of a meaning the gospel always had. At any rate, it is a very precious thing to come suddenly upon a lever with hooks to turn things over so that you can see. The Christian faith becomes in such a moment a fantastic acting out of a decision made millennia before.

Somewhere, sometime, by somebody or bodies who mattered, a decision was taken seriously between two fundamental options. A direction was established. A fundamental point of view became the mode of existence for enough peoples and tribes to create a cultural orientation, a "principle of cohesion," a ground of being. It is the most important decision in the history of the world.2 Everything in the West is derived from this decision. I have no notion whatever who made it, but everything that is Western depends upon it and everything that is now truly Eastern contrasts with it. It marks all of Western life: philosophy, art, architecture, communal life, economics, politics, and religion. Every single aspect of life reflects it and even the Eastern ideas, tools, and vast heritage that remain alive in the West are alive because they contributed to and participated in this decision.

It was the decision to get into this world. Every fundamental inquiry on the nature of things begins here. Every real East-West difference rises here. It now seems to be the key to a so-called Western civilization. Everything proceeds from this decision, and the East must eventually come to terms with it. For this is the real determinant that has put the West in such Eastern places as China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. We cannot refuse to be Western and live. This would be to try to revoke twenty thousand years of history's determined pressure to abhor a vacuum just as nature does.

The Decision to Risk It
In none of my earlier work did I make sufficient allowance for the weight and size of this primal Western decision about matter. In my anxiety to get out of materialism which, says Kant, shatters on the humblest earthworm, I had nearly missed that materialism without which no Western world is possible and with which no real secularism is conceivable.

Our ancestors raised two questions. What is man? What is this cosmos? The Western world is a cohesive and historical whole because it everywhere says the two questions have one answer: Whatever man is can be discovered only by man's involvement with the stuff of this present place and time. Western man literally dove into matter. He exploded out of the Garden of Eden with a hammer in his hand. He hammered, twisted, melted, congealed, braided, shaped, organized, traded, harnessed, mastered the stuff of this present world. The secret of the Western man is the passion with which he sank into matter at whatever risk to Spirit. The West went on a venture, a journey, finding its banners as it went and fighting always its nostalgia to go East and out of this world. It has no indisputable starting point. Fire, wheel, stirrup, plow: all are incidents of the journey into matter. And out of the journey, says De Rougemont, the West has produced alone the first two answers to its question: Man is person; cosmos (order) means machines. But the answers come at considerable risk.

For man came out of Eden both guilty and anxious. He had sinned against Spirit, and this made for guilt. He had risked the loss of Spirit, and this made him anxious. Over his shoulder he had to decide "What shall I do about Spirit? Abandon?" But to his consternation he discovered that Spirit would not abandon him! In his guilt and anxiety he had still his fundamental concerns. What of the self? Is it real or illusory? And what of matter? Is it good or bad? And yet he retained a confidence in Spirit that sustained him on some days. His anxiety has always been that he would go so far from the Garden of Eden he would smother in the stuff that attracted him. He might get so far from Spirit that he would swamp his little boat.

Every Christian thinker of the first six centuries goes to his knees on the horns of this dilemma. Augustine agonized from boyhood through his late twenties before he escaped his Manichaean phase. The two questions are: what about matter and what about the self cosmos and man? For each it was a venture anew. We cannot find the starting point wheel, stirrup, or whatnot. All over the East, matter was evil and a prison for the soul. You cannot find the West's first resolve to run the risk of playing with fire but here we are and still playing with fire. No starting point is found, but you can very easily find its center. For without some true center the West could not have endured the risk and would have gone back into the Nirvana of Spirit in the absence of matter. That answer is obvious to the eye and mind but is not totally without its risks as well.