Why is it that prayer is fundamental to politics? Politics exists to secure the common good. An essential element of the common good is that man should be able to fulfill himself at all levels. The religious level cannot be excluded.
The civilization in which we find ourselves makes prayer difficult. The first thing that strikes one is that our technological civilization brings about a change in the rhythm of human existence. There is a speeding up of tempo which makes it more difficult to find the minimum of freedom on which a minimum life of prayer depends. These are elementary problems, but none the less basic. Prayer is thus rendered almost impossible for most men, unless they display a heroism and a strength of character of which—we must face it—the majority of men are not capable. If it is only the shelter of a rule which makes possible the flowering of a life of prayer for professed religious, then the laity, without this shelter and with added obstacles, must indeed be in difficulties. Shall we say that the life of prayer can be possible only for those who are able to take advantage of such shelter and thus restrict it to only a small part of humanity?
To be a man of prayer, some might say, it is not necessary to consecrate certain times to prayer; men can find God in everything. This is perfectly true. Nevertheless, we begin to find God in everything when we have begun by finding him above and beyond everything. It is practically impossible to lead a life of union with God so long as there has not been that minimum of formal prayer which allows us to acquire spiritual liberty by accustoming us to disengagement from the chains of our environment. I could cite numberless witnesses in support of this thesis. Let me repeat, these matters cannot be discussed in the abstract: the problem must not be put theoretically, but concretely, taking the facts of our lives into account.
Thus we have a problem of rhythm, of the pace of time. We also have the problem of the socialization of our lives. Even as prayer has need of a certain minimum of time, so also it has need of a certain minimum of solitude, a minimum of personal life. In the actual conditions in which men have to live today, this is practically impossible. Urban life sucks people up into a relentlessly collective existence. Père Depierre once said that one of the reasons why working men went to the cinema was to seek silence and solitude. It was only there that they could be free of the necessity of self, who no longer knows who he is, who has had to meet this never-ending barrage of demands from outside himself and who has ended by becoming depersonalized.
The problem with which we have to deal here is not simply that of prayer. In a more general manner, we are concerned with the possibility of personal existence. This is not a problem for only the religious man alone. It is of interest to all men, for all are threatened with becoming mere units in a collective existence. It is obvious that some measure of solitude is essential for prayer to the extent that prayer is the meeting of faith and spiritual experience, the possibility, that is, for faith to become really part of a man. To the extent that faith fails to become an inner part of man, it tends to be nothing more than an external practice; and this is the danger that now threatens.
Another kind of question arises out of this process of “desacralization” which is now going on in our technological civilization, at least in its present stage. Here we touch on very important and very delicate problems, matters on which Christians themselves are divided, but with which it is absolutely essential to deal. The civilizations of the ancient world were sacral; that is to say, they were civilizations in which the framework of human existence had an ultimate religious foundation. That was true of all of them, of the Greek and Roman as also of the Jewish world. It was true also of all the animist societies of Africa and Oceania. It is still true today of the Muslim world. It is evident, however, that technological civilization and the phenomena it brings in its train (urbanization, for instance) break into and overthrow the old social cultures, separate profane culture from religious life, and destroy a certain balance between the social and the religious dimension of man.
The gravity of this crisis for religion and the State must not be minimized. When collective existence was impregnated with religious values there was formed a world in which the very framework of living provided a constantly renewed contact with sacred things. In its traditional form that state of affairs could not survive the irruption of technological civilization. The West suffered the shock first and has still not recovered from it. Until only a short time ago the study of the Koran was the foundation of the culture taught at the University of Fez. Today, the culture which the young Moroccan students want is the technological culture of the West. Muslim youth, who must pass from a stage of civilization which is still sacral to the condition of contemporary civilization, is therefore facing a deep crisis.
One particularly grave aspect of this problem, and one in which our responsibilities are immense, is the irruption of technological civilization into emergent countries such as Madagascar or the countries of Africa. I have discussed these matters recently with a technician from those parts and I am myself terrified by our failure to grasp what is involved. We are aware that technical knowledge is in the process of destroying a whole civilization and we give no thought whatsoever to what is to be put in its place. Of course, it is no more possible to preserve the sacral African forms as they are now than it was to preserve the traditional forms of the Christian civilization. But this in no way detracts from our special responsibility today of finding how to make the religious dimension really present in technological civilization, working through the framework of society itself.
We come back always to the same thought. If that dimension remains completely absent from that society, if we accept a complete dissociation of the sacred and the profane worlds, we shall make access to prayer absolutely impossible to the mass of mankind. Only a few would be able to find God in a world organized without reference to him. Men move not only in their social environment, but in their cultural environment as well. It is through this cultural environment that they can have access to the realities of religion. A world which had built up its culture without reference to God, a humanism from which adoration was completely absent, would make the maintenance of a positive religious point of view impossible for the great majority of men.
There can be no questioning the value of the scientific approach, so long as it does not try to dabble in matters outside its competence. Our task is to find new ways by which the world of contemporary thought, and in particular the world of science, can become a pathway to God. In this connection I would like to recall something that was said by Teilhard de Chardin, in which he showed that for him—and this is one of the aspects of his work that I most admire—it was perfectly possible to take an optimistic view of the question. Teilhard wrote in Sauvons l’humanité: “As it arrives at a higher degree of mastery over self, the spirit of the world finds within itself a more and more pressing need for adoration. The fact of universal evolution makes God appear greater and more necessary than ever. Nothing could be more mistaken than to regard religion as a primitive and passing phase of mankind’s infancy. The more man-like man becomes, the more necessary it is for him to know how to adore and to be able to do it. The fact of religion is an irreversible cosmic fact of the first magnitude.”
This scholar’s declaration of faith that the very progress of scientific evolution ought to bring a greater desire for adoration is one of the most magnificent professions of optimism I have come across. Continuing to use Père Teilhard’s illustration, I would go on to say that while humanity’s infancy is bound up with a particular type of sacral civilization, atheism does not represent the stage of humanity’s adulthood. On the contrary, it represents its adolescence. It comes at that moment exactly when infant humanity revolts against the universe within which it is formed. We know that revolt is essentially an adolescent attitude. With adulthood, on the other hand, comes a higher equilibrium which permits recovery of the fundamental religious values in a new balance of forces.
Why is it that prayer is fundamental to politics? As I have already said, politics exists to secure the common good. An essential element of the common good is that man should be able to fulfill himself at all levels. The religious level cannot be excluded. Indeed, the possibility of self-realization at that level is a fundamental element in the common good. The State must make provision for it, for we cannot suppose that a true polity can exist where there is no room for the religious dimension. In the State there must be a place for both service and adoration. Simone Weil was right to protest against today’s total secularization of society and the universe, and to insist that a constitutive element which keeps a civilization in balance is the fundamental relationship of society and the universe to all that is sacred.
We are aware today of the problem created by the absence of the religious element from the fabric of civilization. There is evidence in several directions that equilibrium is endangered. Science, in particular, is totally unable to guide a movement which it has itself set in train. Men feel that science has sent them on a journey without benefit of steering wheel or brakes. So the question arises, for all men, religious or not, whether the development of technological civilization as such seems a sufficient response to the problem of a humanity in course of development; that is to say, whether this civilization either proposes ends which have any meaning, or provides standards by which progress can be measured.
This raises the question of the function of the spiritual domain within the world of technology. Attempts have been made to find an answer in some philosophy of man, a type of humanism, at the level of which some sort of human order could be established. It must be said that what has been done in this direction so far has not succeeded in finding a solution. A common humanism which could embrace all men of all varieties of spiritual allegiance does not seem to be a practical possibility. Acceptable propositions would have to be so general as not to be capable of supporting any concrete answer. One finds that at the great international conferences men fall into the realm of confusions as soon as they begin to speak of “spiritual values” even though up to that moment argument had been clear and to the point. It would seem that for many men the spiritual is a sphere where all is vague and people can say anything at all, no matter what. For me, the sphere of the spiritual is as rigorous a discipline as that of any of the profane sciences. Theology is just as much a science as physics or linguistics. With it, as with them, only those who are competent can be expected to answer problems meaningfully.
This is where the function of religion in contemporary civilization is to be found. It is my belief that the only people who can contribute anything of value here are the authentic representatives of various religions. No one has found an ideology to replace that presented by the great historical religions. So even though the great world religions have problems to settle between them—and that is their business—they have today a common and indispensable function within the technical ordering of civilization. In performing this function they run up against politics, for Churches and religions are collective realities. While politics cannot touch the inner man for this escapes completely from its competence, it can destroy the Churches. It can reach them because they are the collective expression of adoration. Not only can it do this, it does it.
To the extent that the realization of their essential objects can be prevented by society, the survival of the Churches in a world of technology is a matter of politics.
This essay is taken from Prayer as a Political Problem. Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.
Imaginative Conservative readers may use the code IMCON15 to receive 15% off any order of not-already discounted books from Cluny Media.
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.