It has been often said of our time, that it is essentially a time of spiritual crisis. This is indeed too obvious to need any further proof. Spiritual crisis was already sensed during the first World War and even more acutely realized between the two wars. There arose among youth in various lands, a new feeling of responsibility.
A growing need was recognized by young Christians of all denominations: to bring Christianity out of their homes, out of their private lives; a need to mingle with humanity at large, to break the walls of selfishness; not only the gross material walls of private interests, but also the more delicate partitions of so-called ivory-towers. The shot which killed Peguy resounded in the ears of an entire generation, to which the author of the present article belongs. It shattered an exquisite estheticism.
Such was the reaction in France to a world-crisis symbolized in the death of a soldier and poet. In England, Rupert Brook, in America, Allen Seeger, offered similar examples of a poet's life dedicated unto death. In Russia, too, during World War One and then during the revolution, the members of the intelligentsia abandoned their ivory-tower. Alexander Blok descended into what he called "the night of the people," and Nicholas Berdyaev talked of Christ to Red Army soldiers and factory workers. Killed in the wars, arrested, imprisoned, executed, exiled, or purged, exposed to famine and cold, such became the lot of many a twentieth-century poet and thinker.
A period of crisis is necessarily a period of great suffering; but it is also a period of spiritual liberation, a period of more alert and heightened sensibility, of an immediate grasping of the great elementary forces; of life and death, of the mysterious workings of God.
In the beginning, the suffering was passive, it implied no choice, no decision. Suffering swept over the world; it was a sudden catastrophe in which each had to take a hurried part; that of the hero or of the coward, of the champion fighting for good or evil, of saint or villain. Certain realities became apparent; there could no longer be any human life which was not personally responsible for the common good or evil; there was no human being, who, in some way or other, through his own decisions was not "doing something" to other peoples' lives.
This, no doubt, started the personalist movement, especially Christian personalism. What personalism meant to Christian youth was not only the defense of the dignity of man--for individualism, with all its flaws, also defended this dignity; it was moreover and particularly so, the reaffirmation of the human person's responsibility toward his fellow-men. Instead of being merely an isolated figure walled in within his individual tragedy--the human person now grasped in himself the image and semblance of God, of God's charity, and thus turned to his fellow men.
Personal life, as Mounier for instance states it, "is not retirement into oneself, but movement toward and with others." Therefore "personalism is situated at the very antipode of narcissism, of individualism." This is precisely why personalism meant to Mounier a commitment, the "engagement personnel," as he called it, binding the Christian in conscience to entire mankind. Dostoevsky had formulated this idea in the famous lines of the Brothers Karamazov: "As soon as you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and for all men, you will see at once that it is really so and that you are to blame for everyone and for all things."
The word commitment, engagement became for Mounier's generation, and for those who followed, something of primary importance, as determining essential values: moral, social, religious, action and thought, literature and art, themselves, have become, in the mind of spiritual and intellectual elites, linked with the idea of commitment.
Christian youth, Catholic, Protestant, Russian Orthodox, with their idea of service, as well as atheist existentialist groups with their idea of choice, sought formulas of true commitment as again false commitment, or no commitment at all.. The world held, and still holds a tremendous appeal; it is a call to action, but only to action morally justified and pure, and it is a refusal of any kind of action. From this point of view, the very creation of such a conception is a remarkable ethical phenomenon, born mysteriously from the depths of our crisis.
To quote Mounier once more: "Twentieth-century man experiences a dizziness awakened by these new human spaces, as he experienced yesterday the dizziness awakened by new astronomic spaces." This dizziness, this metaphysical awe, can only be mastered by the sense of brotherhood.
Of the new consciousness, which has entered the soul of man, we have perhaps as yet insufficient realization. After half a century of crisis and catastrophe, we are but dimly aware of the enduring patterns our age has created, both in the negative and in the positive sense. One pattern, at least, which is positive and dynamic, we can begin to trace from its sources and through its subsequent development. The slender, still necessarily incomplete frame of a new moral man is slowly emerging from chaos. The homo ethicus of our time is the man who has sought commitment.
However, commitment has not been in all cases a durable and convincing one. It has changed as the years have gone by and failed in many cases to produce good fruit. It has accepted action in vain, or unjustly rejected it. The idea of choice, as stated by the atheist is more often founded on Pride than on love of the neighbors. But even those who advocate Christian love, seem to drift from the pure impulse of love, and to satisfy their conscience with abstract reasoning. Must one weigh things so minutely, before giving oneself up to a principle, to an idea, to God? Shall our good faith be interminably questioned, before we step into the common arena, and take our place among our fellow-men? Does not commitment in many cases remain academic? It has become a token-pledge in books and manifestos, while sweat and tears and blood are flowing, "saturating the earth to its very core" as Dostoevsky wrote.
"Art is not enough," says Auden. Committed art is also not enough. Committed action itself still implies a grain of impurity, a mental reservation. Even when commitment, as in most cases, is filled with a spirit of unselfishness, it is not yet a complete gift. Something is held back. The just act, justly chosen, is determined not by a loving will, but by self-will. In order to render to the idea of this engagement its full value, so that it should truly become the sign of the new moral man, there has been sought another way; not commitment but oblation, a giving up of oneself entirely instead of a mere intellectual pledge. An act of faith, instead of a choice.
The two women, whose life and works are recounted in the present issue of the THIRD HOUR, Edith Stein and Simone Weil, offer us two examples of such an oblation. In spite of their differences, their experience seem to point the same way; one joined the Church and became a cloistered nun, while the other sought God fervently and was crucified by His absence. One perished in a concentration camp, suffering open persecution and violence. The other died in exile, from self-inflicted privations and austerities, which she wished to share with her people.
Both were among the most highly educated women of their time, both had a philosophical training, and have left a number of writings in their field. Yet both preferred their spiritual quest to their intellectual vocation, "emptying themselves" and humbling themselves through obscurity and menial labors.
Simone Weil was only content when she undertook the hardest works on the land. Edith Stein renounced her scholarly titles to live among simple, mostly uneducated nuns: "Can she sew?" asked one of them of the new postulant, who had lectured brilliantly and been an outstanding philosopher. But it is not in this humbling alone, that Simone Weil's and Edith Stein's oblation was implied. Both of them lived, suffered and died for the love of their fellow-men.
Simone Weil realized when choosing the life of a factory worker (her factory photo ID card to right) and later of a farmhand, that she was linking herself with those she cherished most: the people, the poor, of whom she speaks in her books with such burning compassion. For her, as she tells us, this compassion was an "obligation", an "eternal obligation". It corresponds, she adds, "to the eternal destiny of the human being. The human being alone has an eternal destiny…"
This eternal destiny is, in her eyes, penetrated with the rays of love, which guides it toward its true choice. "Love, true and pure," she writes, "is in itself the spirit of truth. It is the Holy Spirit ... that which we translate spirit of truth, means energy of truth, truth as an active force. Pure love is this active force, love which at no price, and in no case, desires either lies or error."
This ultimate giving up of oneself to the Holy Spirit is even more abundantly revealed in the life and death of Edith Stein.. After reading Saint Teresa, she exclaims: "That is the truth," and from that until her death she prefers nothing to that truth she has discovered. "My longing for truth," she writes, "is my only prayer."
(photo of Edith Stein as Sister Theresa Blessed by the Cross to left)
Yet, she too, is deeply aware that her salvation is not isolated; it is linked to that of her people, of Israel, whose cross she assumes. Of her first visit to the Carmel, which she was to enter twelve years later, she says: "I talked to God and told Him that it was His Cross which had now been laid on the Jewish people. Most persons did not understand this. But those who understood, had to take it voluntarily upon themselves in the name of all. I wanted to do so. He had only to show me how ... I had the inner conviction that my prayer would be heard. But what this bearing of the cross would be, that I did not know."
The bearing of the cross meant a way of the cross that Edith in those early days of her conversion could not foresee. She was to be torn out first from the Koeln Carmel which she loved, then from the new community she had been sent to join. She was thrown back into the world from which she had sought to take refuge. She spent her last days on earth with Jews like herself, three hundred of them, men, women and children.
Here we find a striking analogy with the Russian nun Mother Maria Skobtsov (photo to right), another example of oblation, whose story we related in one of our former issues. She, too, knew the crowded barracks of a concentration camp, the smell of death, the terrors, but also the supreme bolts of love-- among a human flock with whom she bad become one, not through doom alone, but also through compassion. Not bearing merely her own cross, but that of others; the commitment, the "obligation" carrying her off her feet, till choice was no more, and there was only the giving up of herself.
This final step must have been however determined long ago, when the first step was taken. There is a mystery in such a decision, as in Edith's "Das wusst ich nicht," "This I did not know." In one of' her poems, Mother Maria expressed some of this mystery; she wrote:
What shall we answer? What can we answer?
We can only silently fall to our knees,
Under the lashes of the chastening whip,
Under the deathly rain of bullets.
Neither Edith Stein, nor Mother Maria, nor, for that matter, Simone Weil had the death which they expected, nor perhaps desired. St. Therese of Lisieux wanted to be a missionary performing heroic deeds, and died in the bleak walls of an infirmary. God consults no human plans even when they are drawn up by saints, or by those who seek sanctity.
But their choice, is justified at the end. There is something Christlike in their destinies, as pointed out by Father da Souza in his article, speaking of Gandhi. In the great Indian leader, too, we find an oblation for his people, a choice, a commitment, starting way back in his youth and leading him mysteriously to an end which be could not foresee, and which was the crowning of his entire life.
And was not Mounier's own engagement personnel, something extending far beyond his intellectual and social outlook? His bitter struggles exceeded his physical powers, left him naked and unarmed in the face of overwhelming forces. He, too, bore his cross and that of the people, and his "personalist manifesto," unlike so many other manifestos, is a living document for generations to come. The mood of these generations may change, but the spirit in which he wrote will survive these changes because of Mounier's end--the premature death of a poor man; exhausted, but not defeated.
Responsibility as evolved in our time of crisis is then not only an ethical, but also a deeply spiritual and even mystical manifestation. While the homo ethicus seeks commitment, the homo mysticus of our time knows that commitment, translated in supernatural terms, means oblation. We might say in other words, that every true and sincere commitment leads, or at least points toward oblation.
It also points toward the brotherhood of man, desperately needed in our time: "that terrible desire to establish contact," as Catherine Mansfield wrote.
To this cry of solitude, Dostoevsky gives the answer: "The true person, he says, is linked to other persons by love and the spirit of sacrifice, free, voluntary sacrifice ... A free, entirely conscious self-sacrifice-which has not been imposed by any one, the sacrifice of one's whole self for the good of the whole, is in my mind the sign of the highest development of the person, of the person's highest power, of the greatest self-control, of the highest freedom of our own will. To lay down one's life for all men, to be crucified for all men is possible only thanks to the highest development of personality."
For us, as for Dostoevsky, the highest attainment of personality should be to become Christlike; Christ is Truth confounding all the stratagems of rationalism, just as Christ is oblation, defeating all the forces of egotism. Choosing Him, we cannot choose but Truth and choosing Truth, we also finally choose Oblation.
―Excerpted from First Hour: Issue V, 1951