The Complex Vision

by John Cowper Powys

Only when the co-ordination of our human activities rises to the height of a supreme music, can we regard "religion" as the most beautiful and most important of all human experiences. And at the moment when it takes this form it resolves itself into nothing more than an unutterable feeling of ecstasy produced by the sense that we are in harmony with the rest of the universe. Religion, as I am compelled to think of it, resolves itself into that reaction of unspeakable happiness produced in us, when by any kind of synthetic movement, however crude, we are either saved from unreality or reconciled to reality.

Religion is, in fact, the name we give to the ecstasy in the heart of the complex vision, when, in any sort of coordination between our contradictory energies, we at once escape from ourselves and realize ourselves. We are forbidden to speak of the "religious sense" or the "religious instinct" because, truly interpreted, religion is not a single activity among other activities, but the emotional reaction upon our whole nature when that nature is functioning in its creative fulness.

Religion must therefore be regarded as the culminating ecstasy of the art of life, or as a premature snatching at such an ecstasy while the art of life is still discordant and inchoate. In the first instance it is the supreme reward of the creative act. In the second instance it is a tragic temptation to rest by the way in a unity which is an illusive unity and in a heaven from which "the sun of the morning" is excluded. It thus comes about that what we call religion is frequently a hindrance to the rhythm of the apex-thought. It may be a sentimental consolation. It may be an excuse for cruelty and obscurantism. There is always a danger when it is thus prematurely manifested, that it should darken, distort, deprave and obstruct the movement of creation.

At this point, an objection arises to our whole method of research which it is necessary to meet at once. This objection, a peculiarly modern one, is based upon the theory, handed about in modern literature as a kind of diploma of cleverness and repeated superficially by many who are not really sceptical at all, that it is impossible in this world to arrive, under any circumstances, at any kind of truth.

Persons who repeat this sceptical dogma are simply refusing to acknowledge the evidence of their own experience. However rare our high rhythmic moments may be, some sort of approximation to them, quite sufficient to destroy the validity of this absolute scepticism, must, if a person honestly confesses the truth, and does not dissimulate out of intellectual pride, have entered into the experience of every human being.

Let us, however, consider the kind of dogmatic language which these sceptics use. They speak of "life" as a thing which so perpetually changes, expands, diminishes, undulates, advances, recedes, evolves, revolves, explodes, precipitates, lightens, darkens, thins, thickens, hardens, softens, over-brims, concentrates, grows shallow, grows deep, that it were ridiculous even to attempt to create an equilibrium, or rhythmic "parting-of-the-ways," out of such evasive and treacherous material.

My answer to this sceptical protest is a simple one. It is an appeal to human experience. I maintain that this modern tendency to talk dogmatically and vaguely about "the evasive fluidity of life" is nothing more than a crafty pathological retreat from the formidable challenge of life. It is indeed a kind of mental drug or spiritual opiate by the use of which many unheroic souls hide themselves from the sardonic stare of the eternal Sphinx. It is a weakness comparable to the weakness of many premature religious syntheses; and it has the same soothing and disintegrating effect upon the creative energy of the mind.

What, as a matter of fact, hurts us all, much more than any tendency of life to be over-fluid and over-evasive, is the atrocious tendency of life to be inflexible, rigorous, implacable, harshly immobile. This vague dogmatic sentiment about "the fluidity of life," is one of the instinctive ways by which we try to pretend that our prison-walls are not walls at all, but only friendly and flowing vapour. None of the great works of art and poetry, the austere beauty of which reflects the real nature of the universe, could continue to exercise their magical power upon us, could continue to sustain us and comfort us, if those tragic ultimate realities were not ultimate realities.

The sublime ritual of art, which at its noblest has the character of religion, could not exist for a moment in a world as softly fluctuating and as dimly wavering as this modern scepticism would make it. Life is at once more beautiful and far more tragic. Though surrounded by mystery the grand outlines of the world remain austerely and sternly the same. The sun rises and sets. The moon draws the tides. Man goes forth to his work and his labour until the evening. Man is born; man loves and hates; man dies. And over him the same unfathomable spaces yawn. And under him the same unfathomable spaces yawn. Time, with its seasons, passes him in unalterable procession. From birth to death his soul wrestles with the universe; and the drama of which he is the protagonist lifts the sublime monotony of its scenery from the zenith to the nadir.

Let any man ask himself what it is that hurts him most in life and yet seems most real to him. He will be compelled to answer . . . "the atrocious regularity of things and their obscene necessity." The very persons who talk so glibly about the "fluidity" and "evasiveness" of life are persons in whose own flesh the wedge-like granite of fate has lodged itself with crushing finality. Life has indeed been too rigid and too stark for them; and in place of seizing it in an embrace as formidable as its own, they go aside muttering, "life is evasive; life is fluid; life brims over."