Towards the Great Peace

by Ralph Adams Cram

[Illustration: DIAGRAM NO. 1. The interpenetration of Matter by Spirit. x, The primary Unknowable; x', the ultimate Unknowable; [Greek: alpha], the plane of Matter; [Greek: beta], the plane of Life.]

Now there is eternally in process a penetration of the stratum of matter by jets of the élan vital from the realm of pure spirit, each as it were striving to detach from the plane of matter some small portion, which is transformed in its passage through life and achieves entrance into the ultimate unknowable, when the process of redemption is, for this small particle, completed. Always, however, is exerted the gravitational pull of matter, and the energy that drove through, instead of pursuing a right line, tends to bend in a parabolic curve, like the trajectory of a cannon ball. In the completion of the process some portion of redeemed matter "gets by," so to speak, but other portions do not; they return to their source of origin and are reabsorbed in matter, becoming subject to the operation of future interpenetrating jets of spiritual energy. The upward drive of the élan vital constitutes what may properly be known as evolution, the declining fall the process of devolution or degeneration. Evolution then is only one part of the cosmic process, it is inseparable from degeneration.

This process holds in the case of individuals, of families, of races, of states and of eras, or definite and completed periods of time. As man is begotten, born, developed to maturity and then is brought downward to the grave, so in the case of races and nations and the clearly defined epochs into which the history of man divides itself. There is no mechanical system of "progress," no cumulative wisdom and power that in the end will inevitably lead to earthly perfection and triumph. For every individual there is the possibility of spiritual evolution within the time allotted that will open for him the gates that bar the frontiers of the world of reality and of redemption that lies beyond that world of earthly life which is the field of contest between unredeemed matter and redeeming spirit, of contest and of victory—or of failure. In the case of races and nations and epochs there is the same conflict between material factors and spiritual energy; the same crescent youth with all its primal vitality, maturity with its assurance and competence, and the dying fall of dissipating energies. In each case death is the concomitant of life but there is always something that lasts over, and that is the spiritual achievement, the precious residuum that remains, defying death and dissolution, that infuses the plane of life with its redemptive ardour, and is the heritage of lives that come after, acting with the sacramental agencies of religion in coöperation with God Who ordained and compassed them both, in that great process of redemption and salvation that is continually taking place and will continue until matter, and time which is but the ratio of the resistance of matter to the redeeming power of spirit, shall be no more.

I confess the hopelessly mechanical quality in this vain attempt to put into words something that by its very nature must transcend all modes of expression that are intellectually apprehendable. Taken literally it would be entirely false and probably heretical from a theological point of view, as it certainly is more than inadequate as a philosophical proposition. It is intended only as a symbol, and a gross symbol at that, but as such I will let it stand.

Now if there is indeed a possible truth hidden somewhere within somewhat clumsy approximations, it must modify some of our generally accepted ideas. The life-process will appear, not a slow, interrupted, but substantially forward development from lower and simpler organisms to higher and more complex, with the end (if there be an end), beyond the very limits of eternity, but rather a swift creation of some of the highest forms through the first energy of the creative force, with the throwing off of ever lower and lower forms as the curve of the trajectory descends. So through a mass of low and static vitality comes the sudden and enormous power that produces at the very beginnings of our own recorded history of man, the almost superhuman intelligence and capacity of the Greeks and the Egyptians. So each of the definite eras of civilization opens with the releasing of great energies, the revealing of great figures of paramount character and force. So, conversely, as the energy declines, men appear less and less potent and in a descending scale. This is the case with the Greek states, with the Roman Republic and the Empire, with Byzantium, with

Mediaevalism, and with our modern era. I do not know of any other theory that claims to explain the perpetual and rhythmical fluctuations of history, as violent in their degree as they are approximately regular in their rhythm.

Following the idea a little further, it may even appear that many of the lower, and particularly the more distorted, forms of animal life, instead of being abortive or undeveloped stages in a continuous evolutionary progress, are actually the product of a diminishing energy, stages in a process of degeneration, and therefore leading not upward to ever higher stages of development having issue at last in a completed perfection, but rather downward to ultimate extinction. Geology records this process in sufficient quantity, so far as many members of the animal kingdom are concerned, and we, in our own day, have seen the extinction of the dodo as well as the threatened disappearance of other species. Creeping and crawling creatures too, that we could crush with the heel, are but the last and puny descendants of mighty and terrible monsters that once rolled and crashed through the fetid forests of the carboniferous era. So there are races of men today, amongst others the pygmies of Africa and the Australian bushmen, as well as some nearer in a certain degree to the dominant races of the world, whom large-hearted optimists regard as stages of retarded development, capable, under tutelage, of advance to a level with the Caucasian, but who, in this view of the case, would be but the weakening product of the "dying fall" of the energy that produced the Greek, the Semite and the Nordic stocks.

So in the last instance, the ape and the lemur and all their derivatives may be, not records of some of the many stages through which man has passed in his process of evolution, sidetracked by the upward rush of one highly favoured or fortunate line, nor yet an abortive branch from the common trunk from which sprang both man and ape, but rather the last degradation of a primaeval energy, producing in its declension these strange caricatures of the Man in whose production it found its achievement. In other words, the old evolutionary idea is exactly reversed, and those phenomena once looked on as passed stages of growth, become the memorials of a creative process that has already achieved, and is now returning, with its fantastic manifestations in terms of declining life, even to that primordial mystery whence it had emerged.

Granting this theory, the search for the "missing link," whether in the geological strata below those that revealed the Piltdown skull, or in the fastnesses of Central Asia, is as vain a quest as it has always been. Primaeval man, as he is grudgingly revealed to us, may have been the degenerate remainder of an earlier and fully developed race whose records are buried in the sunken fastnesses of some vanished Atlantis or Lemuria, as the races of the South Sea Islands may be less metamorphosed remnants of the same stock. Into this infinitely degraded residuum of a vanished race entered the new energizing force when the divine creative energy came once more into operation, in the fullness of time, and the Minoan, the Egyptian and the Greek came almost in an hour to their highest perfection. So through the unnumbered ages of the world's history, God has from time to time created man in His own image, out of the dust of the earth, and man so made "a little lower than the angels" has, also in time, fallen and forfeited his inheritance. Yet the process goes on without ceasing, and in conformity with some law of divine periodicity; but it is Man that is created in the beginning, of his full stature, even as is symbolically recorded in the Book of Genesis; not a hairy quadrumana that by the operation of the laws of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, ultimately and through endless ages, and by the most infinitesimal changes, becomes at last Plato and Caesar, Leonardo and Dante, St. Louis and Shakespeare and St. Francis.

Now in this process of the interpenetration of matter by spirit there must be a certain periodicity, if it is a constant process and not one accomplished once and for all time in the very beginnings of the world. This rhythmical action, which is exemplified by every phenomenon of nature, the vibratory process of light, sound, heat, electricity, the pulsation of the heart, the motion of the tides, has never escaped the observation even of primitive peoples, and always attempts have been made to determine its periodicity. May it not be infinitely complex, as the ripple rises on the wave that lifts on the swell of the underlying tide? Certainly we are now being forced back to a new consideration of this periodical beat, in history at least, for now that our own era, which came in by the power of the Renaissance and the Reformation and received its final energizing force through the revolutions of the eighteenth century and the industrial revolution of the nineteenth, is so manifestly coming to its end, we look backward for precedents for this unexpected debacle and lo, they appear every five hundred years back as far as history records. 500 B.C., Anno Domini; 500 A.D., 1000 A.D., and 1500 A.D. are all, to the point of very clear approximation, nodal points, where the curve of the preceding five centuries, having achieved its crest, curves downward, and in its fall meets the curve of rising energy that is to condition the ensuing era. The next nodal point, calculated on this basis, comes about the year 2000. Are we not justified, in plotting our trajectory of modernism, in placing the crest in the year 1914, and in tracing the line of fall from that moment?