Prologue

Civilization

by William Anderson

All civilizations possess in their beginnings one feature in common: they present a new image of Man. In each case the image and the way it is manifested will vary according to the resources and the needs of the epoch. For Periclean Athens a new ideal of man was presented in the form of drama, publicly in the tragedies of the great playwrights and for private reading in the dialogues of Plato. At the beginning of the Christian era a completely new conception of man, of man who forgives and loves his enemies and is at one with his Father, was given to the world in the form of the Gospels. Within the different stages of other religions such as Hinduism or Buddhism, we can point to the many stages of renewal of the ideal of the realized man, as given, in the one case, in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita and, in the other, to the portrayals, in painting and sculpture, of the Bodhisattvas.
          In every case it can be shown that the new image arises to transcend the conflicts of the age and to resolve dualisms through a fresh conception of the unity of man with his Maker and the natural world. It is as though the deepest power in the soul of humanity, welling over with compassion and concern for the struggles and divisions of men, surges up with a vision of all that has been lost or disregarded, of infinite possibilities of thoughts and emotions, of achievement that could be encompassed, and of new directions and vocations to which men might aspire. 
          The means by which each civilization has flourished and left its mark have depended on certain men and women turning in their need to the springs of consciousness and creation which they share at the deepest levels with all humanity. They are the interpreters of the dreams of their fellow men, the clear-sighted namers of the ruling symbols, the archetypes of power, whose raw energies must be purified and directed by the prayers and contemplations of the saint, by the courage and expressive capacities of the poet and the artist, and the rationality and speculative genius of the philosopher and the scientist.
          The purpose of civilization is to conquer barbarism, which is the condition of living in a state of fear. A great civilization provides, on the scale of nations, the expression of love, a basis of security, the sharing of experience, and hope for this life and the next. It allows the development of talents that would languish in small enclosed societies preoccupied solely with self-preservation. Cicero’s name for the higher pursuits of civilization was humanitas, a term that was familiar to the scholars of the Middle Ages and one that centres all studies and skills on the fully developed nature of man.
          Civilization may be seen as the application of conscious will to the amorphous energies of the human psyche, diverting those energies away from their dissipation in fear and war into peaceful and fruitful ends. The technology of a civilization has always been employed to develop methods of attack and defence for the preservation of society, in other words to provide security from physical fear, but true civilization deals with fear at the deeper levels of the mind. Technology, seen in this way, is, in the first place, a matter of the spirit. Behind the social, political, and economic forces that dictate the life of humankind are the infinitely more powerful archetypal powers of the psyche, and it is by drawing these powers into the light of consciousness and giving them direction that the artist, the thinker, and the man of religion, free us from the superstition, the fear, and the prejudices by which our lives are otherwise ruled.
           The Gothic era was the effect of men working together in a common spirit in which their religion, their art, their philosophy, and their science and technology were in harmony. For the opposite effect in the present century, one can point to the achievements of the international body of physicists, who, freed from an outworn religion, careless of art, taking from philosophy its intellectual and logical rigour but not its speculative and moral purpose, made of their science and its applications so powerful a weapon for investigating and changing the natural world that their knowledge became desirable to governments and administrators. Lacking the support of all the other higher forms of knowledge and of inspiration which they had rejected as superstitious or irrelevant, knowing no moral imperative except the furtherance of their science, they sold themselves in exchange for government support to the forces of barbarism. In the determinist philosophy guiding modern science, there is no sanction for the working of conscience.
          The great art of the Gothic masters lives under the same shadow as modern man: the threat of destruction so complete that, should any of them survive as ruins as beautiful and haunting as those of Rievaulx and St-Jean des Vignes at Soissons, the men and women who also survive will be sunk into a barbarism so absolute that in their struggle to live there will be no learning to preserve their history, no time to contemplate the message of their remaining fragments. Yet to help in the avoidance of such disaster, these great buildings, the greatest works of art achieved by our western civilization, can still challenge us with the transformation of hatred and barbarism into love and civilization brought about by our ancestors, saying to us, ‘We were made the images of man for our time in his wholeness, in his beauty, in the identity of his true self with his creator. What image of man will you construct that will be the vocation of a new civilization, bringing harmony to the dualism of materialism and the needs of the soul, transforming fear and hatred into love, and returning the spontaneity of joy to art?’

from The Rise of the Gothic, Hutchinson, 1985

There is a beautiful passage in another book by the same author, called The Face of Glory: Creativity, Consciousness and Civilization. He died shortly after writing it but left these words as his legacy:

Creation begins and continues as a single sound. That sound includes all ideas, meanings and all expressions of meaning and all possible languages. It is Universal Consciousness letting itself be known as the Word. That sound holds within itself all rhythms, melodies, chords and all the possibilities of music. It is Universal Consciousness letting itself be known as song.

That sound resonates in eternity and its resonances create voids and spaces and a diversity of experiences of time, the time experience of a galaxy, a tree, a man, a mayfly. It still holds within itself all lights and darknesses and all possible variety of colours. It also holds all natural laws and the principles of life and intelligent life. It creates beings capable of consciousness themselves who are the spectators and the audiences of its creation. It is Universal Consciousness letting itself be known as glory.

We, the human race, are the creation of that sound and, as we are made conscious by its light and will, so we share in its creative possibilities. Where we think we invent, we discover; where we suppose we originate, we are supplied from the true origins. In our ultimate essence, our true individuality, we are that sound and through our existence we are ears to hear that sound and mouths to utter that sound. 

The Face of Glory: Creativity, Consciousness and Civilization, Bloomsbury Ltd., London 1996

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