Thomas Merton

He who speaks of symbols enters an area where reflection, synthesis, and contemplation are more important than investigation, analysis, and science. One cannot apprehend a symbol unless one is able to awaken, in one’s own being, the spiritual resonances which respond to the symbol not only as sign but as “sacrament” and “presence.”

Needless to say, when we speak of symbol here we are interested only in the full and true sense of the word. Mere conventional symbols, more or less arbitrarily taken to represent something else, concrete images which stand for abstract qualities, are not symbols in the highest sense. The true symbol does not merely point to something else. It contains in itself a structure which awakens our consciousness to a: new awareness of the inner -meaning of life and of reality itself. A true symbol takes us to the center of the circle, not to another point on the circumference. A true symbol points to the very heart of all being, not to an incident in the flow of becoming.

Hence symbolism is always important in religion and worship. Symbols do not only point to “hidden realities” which are “higher.” They are in themselves religious realities in their own right, especially when their nature is sacramental.

2.

It is by symbolism that man enters affectively and consciously into contact with his own deepest self, with other persons and with God. When symbols lose their meaning, God ceases to be present to humans and man ceases to be fully present to himself. Then he feels that “God is dead.” But this means, in fact, that symbols are dead. The death of symbolism is itself the most eloquent and significant symbol in our modern cultural life.

Since man cannot live without the creative language of sign and gesture, and since his capacity to apprehend the visible and the invisible as a meaningful unity depends on the creative vitality of his symbols, then, even though he may claim to have no further interest in this “bringing together” (which is the etymological sense of “symbol”) man will nevertheless persist in spite of himself in making symbols. If they are not living signs of creative integration and inner life, then they will become morbid, and pathogenic signs of his own inner disruption.

Neurosis is structured on a sick and private system of symbols. The solemn vulgarity, indeed the spiritually hideous and sometimes unconsciously obscene nature of some of the “symbols” that are still held worthy of respect by the establishment and by the masses (whether in the capitalist West or in socialist countries), has naturally aroused the total protest of the modern artist who now prefers to create anti-art and non-symbol, or else contemplates without tremor and without comment the ultimate spiritual affront of those forms and presences which marketing and affluence have made “normal” and “ordinary” everywhere.

3.

The loss of the sense of symbol is due in part to an incapacity to distinguish between the symbol and the indicative sign. The function of the sign is communication, and first of all the communication of factual or practical knowledge. The function of the symbol is not the statement of facts nor the conveyance of information, even of spiritual information about absolute or religiously revealed truths. A symbol does not merely teach and inform. Nor does it explain.

It is quite true that the content of a religious symbol is usually rich with spiritual or revealed truth. Nevertheless, revelation and spiritual vision are contained in symbols not in order that one may extract them from the symbol and study them or appropriate them intellectually apart from the symbol itself. Revealed truth is made present concretely and existentially in symbols and is grasped in and with the symbol by a living response of the subject.

This response defies exact analysis and cannot be accurately described to one who does not experience it authentically in himself. The capacity for such experience is developed by living spiritual traditions and by contact with a spiritual master (guru) or with a vital and creative liturgy, and a living doctrine. So, to demand that a symbol should fulfill the function of informing and explaining, or clarifying and scientifically verifying facts about the cosmos, or about man’s place in the cosmos, or about man’s relation to God, is to demand that the symbol should do what indicative or quantitative signs do.

As soon as one makes such a demand, he immediately becomes convinced that the symbol is of far less practical value than the sign. In a world where practical use and quantitative scientific information are highly prized, the symbol quickly becomes meaningless.
When the symbol is called upon to communicate, it necessarily restricts itself to conveying the most trivial kind of idea or information. The symbol is then reduced to the level of the trademark or the political badge, a mere sign of identification. Identification is not identity. “Rubber stamp” identification is actually a diminution or loss of identity, a submersion of identity in the generalized class. The pseudo symbols of the mass movement become signs of the pseudo mystique in which the mass man loses his individual self in the false, indeed the demonic void, the general pseudo self of the Mass Society. The symbols of the Mass Society are rallying points for emotion, fanaticism, and exalted forms of hatred masking as moral indignation. The symbols of Mass Society are ciphers on the face of a moral and spiritual void.

4.

Werner Heisenberg, the physicist, has discussed the revolutionary change in man’s attitude toward nature in an age of science and technology.* In the pres-cientific era man sought even in his “scientific” investigations to arrive at the most living and most qualitatively significant apprehension of nature as a whole. Such an apprehension, even when it contained elements of experiment and objective observation, remained essentially poetic, philosophical, and even religious.

Modem science does not seek to create a “living representation” but to acquire and co-ordinate quantitative data from which to construct explanations or simply working hypotheses which have a practical orientation. Where religion, philosophy, and poetry use the power of the creative symbol to attain a synthetic apprehension of life in its ultimate metaphysical roots, science uses technical instruments to gather quantitative data about the physical universe and those data are reduced to mathematical formulas, which can then serve the practical needs of technology.

What is not generally realized yet is that modern science itself has undermined the world view of naive materialism which believed that “ultimate reality” could be found in the elementary particles of matter. Science has above all destroyed the materialistic idea of a purely objective knowledge in which we can, with absolute certitude, make statements about “reality” based on our observations of matter, as if we ourselves were observing everything from a platform of “science” hovering far from earth in a pure realm of truth.

Actually, as Heisenberg says, we cannot observe the particles of matter as pure objects since the fact of our observation itself enters into the interaction and behavior of the entities we observe. Hence it is that the formulas of the atomic physicist represent “no longer the behavior of the elementary particles but rather our knowledge of this behavior.”

At the same time technology as it develops and apparently “penetrates” the “mysteries of nature” in so doing “transforms our environment and impresses our image upon it.” This use of technology and science to transform nature and bring it under man’s power appears to Heisenberg an extension of biological processes so that man’s technology becomes part of him as the spider’s web is inseparable from the biology of the spider.

The result of this is that man no longer stands in opposition to nature; he confronts no adversary in the world in which he is alone with himself and which he will soon completely transform in his own image. But the problem arises: there does remain one adversary, man himself, and as Heisenberg says, in this situation man’s technology, instead of broadening and expanding man’s capacities for life, suddenly threatens to contract them and even destroy them altogether. “In such a confrontation, the extension of technology need no longer be an indication of progress.”

Now symbolism exercised its vital and creative function in a cosmos where man had to come to terms with a nature in which he was struggling to maintain a place in his own – albeit a place of spiritual preeminence. Symbolism strives to “bring together” man, nature, and God in a living and sacred synthesis. But technological man finds himself in another artificial synthesis in which he has no longer any knowledge of anything except himself, his machines, and his knowledge that he knows what he knows.

This knowledge is not a knowledge of reality, but a knowledge of knowledge. That is to say – man no longer is “in contact with nature” but is only well situated to the context of his own experiments. He can say with certainty how an experiment will turn out, but he cannot find any ultimate meaning for this. Man is therefore cut off from any reality except that of his own processes – and that of the extraordinary new world of his machines.

As the knowledge of his own disorientation cannot be handled, he turns more and more to his machines but through the power of his machines he acts out the uncomprehended tragedy of his inner disruption. As Heisenberg says in this arresting comparison: “man finds himself in the position of a captain whose ship has been so securely built of iron and steel that his compass no longer points to the north but only towards the ship’s mass of iron.”

*All quotations from Werner Heisenberg in this section are from his essay “The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics” (1954).

Heisenberg quotes the Chinese sage Chuang Tzu who, twenty-five hundred years ago discovered that dependence even on a simple kind of machine caused man to become “uncertain in his inner impulses.” Naturally, the advance of science and technology is irreversible and man now has to come to terms with himself in his new situation. He cannot do so if he builds an irrational and unscientific faith on the absolute and final objectivity of scientific knowledge of nature. The limits of science must be recognized and blind faith in an uncontrolled proliferation of technology must be abjured.

To return to the ship’s captain, Heisenberg says that his danger will be less if he recognizes what has gone wrong and tries to navigate by some other means – for instance by the stars. To “navigate by the stars” he needs to go beyond the limitation of a scientific world view and recover his sense of the symbol.

5.

Alfred North Whitehead, who, as a scientist, took a cool and detached view of symbolism, declared that society needed to defend itself against the proliferation of symbols, “which have a tendency to run wild like the vegetation of a tropical forest.” It is certainly true that a mass of obscure symbols that have ceased to illuminate and invigorate may end by stifling social and personal life. Therefore, “an occasional revolution in symbolism is required,” says Whitehead, in a rather offhand way, as if symbols could be created anew by act of Parliament. Nevertheless Whitehead is quite definite in saying, “Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.” He sees clearly that symbolism does not seek merely to convey information but to enhance the importance and value of what it symbolizes (see his Symbolism, Its Meaning and Efficacy, p. 63).

He points out how in social life symbolism replaces “the force of instinct which suppresses individuality” and creates instead a dynamism of thought and action in which the individual person can integrate his own free activity into the work of the commonweal, without simply submitting, in passive and automatic fashion, to external directives of authority.

By means of the social symbol, the person can make the common good really his own. By means of the religious symbol, the person can enter into communion not only with his fellow man and with all creation, but with God. Symbolism is powerful, says Whitehead, because of its “enveloping suggestiveness and emotional efficacy” (id. p. 67). However, the symbol is not merely emotional, and “it affords a foothold for reason by its delineation of the particular instinct which it expresses” (id. p. 70 ).

Whitehead, however, thinking in terms of the mass-movement and of blind political prejudice, points to the danger of those (political) symbols which evoke a direct (reflex) response without reference to any meaning whatever. The effect of such symbols becomes hypnotic-certain responses, usually violent, are elicited without thought and without moral judgment.

Thus in certain unhealthy situations the political or military symbol can produce the automatic obedience of storm troopers and political policemen who are ready for any savagery and any violation of the rights and dignity of man. The symbol, in this case, has the effect of suppressing conscience and reasoned judgment and releasing pathological violence and hate in a demonic communion. (See article by Ted Schmidt in the ‘Feature’ Tab, entitled “Eyeless in Gaza”.)

But is this the fault of symbolism as such? Certainly not. It is due to the degradation and misuse of symbols. A man who is trained to respond to higher, more creative, and more spiritual symbols will instantly react in revulsion against the sinister power of totalist symbols. His reaction, too, is instinctive and as it were automatic. What matters then is not that the symbol tends to concentrate around itself man’s instinctive forces for action and self-dedication, but that living and creative symbols elevate and direct that action in a positive and creative sense, while pathogenic and depraved symbols divert man’s energies to negation and destruction.

The point is to educate men so that they can discern one from the other.

But if in our education we assume that all symbolism is mere fantasy and illusion, we no longer teach people to make this distinction. Hence while imagining they have risen above the “childishness” of symbolism, they will easily and uncritically submit, in fact, to the fascination of the perverse and destructive symbols which are actually obsessing the whole society in which they live.

In our modern world the fascination of violence has become, through T.V., magazines, movies, radio, etc., so pervasive as to be almost irresistible. There is now so much free-floating terror and hatred in the moral climate of our culture, that the slightest and most ridiculous of actions can be interpreted symbolically and instantly unleash mass hysteria. The only remedy for this is in a return to the level of spiritual wisdom on which the higher symbols operate. This is easy enough to say: but is it actually possible today? Have we in fact simply fallen away from our capacity for “symbolically conditioned action” in the higher sense (guidance by the meaning and wisdom of the higher symbol) and relapsed into purely reflex and instinctive action without reference to meaning, and above all without any rational sense of causality and responsibility?

At the end of his suggestive essay, without perhaps fully intending to do so, Whitehead speaks of the community life of ants governed (probably) by pure instinct rather than by meaningful symbol.

It is no new idea to say that if man does survive in his cybernetic society without blowing himself up, it may well be that, renouncing the creative symbol and living mechanically, he learns to make his world into a vast anthill. If mere survival is all we desire, this may seem a satisfactory prospect. But if our vocation is to share creatively in the spiritualization of our existence, then the anthill concept is somewhat less than desirable.

6.

Obviously the direction that symbolism must take is that of expressing union, understanding, and love among men – what Tillich has called a “communal eros.” But the crude symbolism of violence has gained its power precisely from the fact that the symbolism of love has been debased, cheapened, and dehumanized. There is something very frightening about the awful caricature of love and beauty which has manifested itself for several centuries, growing progressively worse, in Western literature and art, including religious literature and art, until today the sensitive mind recoils entirely from the attempt to see and portray “the beautiful” and concentrates on the drab, the absurd, the meaningless, the formless, in a sincere attempt to clear the desecrated sanctuary of the rubbish which fills it.

In technological society, in which the means of communication and signification have become fabulously versatile, and are at the point of an even more prolific development, the very nature and use of communication itself becomes unconsciously symbolic. Though he now has the capacity to communicate anything, anywhere, instantly, man finds himself with little or nothing to say.

Not that there are not many things he could communicate, or should attempt to communicate. He should, for instance, be able to meet with his fellow man and discuss ways of building a peaceful world. He is seemingly incapable of this kind of confrontation. Instead of this, he has intercontinental ballistic missiles which can deliver nuclear death to tens of millions of people in a few moments. This is the most sophisticated message modem man apparently, to convey to his fellow man. It is of course a message about himself, his alienation from himself, and his inability to come to terms with life.

The vital role of the symbol is precisely this: to express and to encourage man’s acceptance of his own center, his own ontological roots in a mystery of being that transcends his individual ego.

But when man is reduced to his empirical self and confined within its limits, he is, so to speak, excluded from himself, cut off from his own roots, condemned to spiritual death by thirst and starvation in a wilderness of externals. In this wilderness there can be no living symbols, only the dead symbols of dryness and destruction which bear witness to man’s own inner ruin. But he cannot “see” these symbols, since he is incapable of interior response.

In a recent essay, an American theoretician of nuclear war devised an elaborate “ladder of escalation” in which his avowed purpose was to construct a rudimentary language. It is a language of destruction, in, which each rung on the “ladder” (including massive exchanges of nuclear weapons, destruction of cities, missile sites, etc.) was a way of “saying something” and of “conveying information” to the enemy. One feels that millennia ago, in the early Stone Age, communication among men must have been more basic, more articulate, and more humane. The “ladder” (itself an ancient symbol, as in Genesis 28: 12, as in Babylonian religion, as in the cosmic tree, the axis mundi of Asian myths, etc.) has now become a symbol of the total and negative futility of a huge technological machine organized primarily for destruction. At the top of the ladder is not God, but “Spasm.” But “spasm” is on every rung. All rungs of escalation are “insensate war.”

Curiously, this formula of escalation was first solemnly proposed in a book then adopted officially in the prosecution of the Vietnam war. The war became a monologue of American escalation which was meant to convince the Vietnamese that they had no hope of winning. The primitive enemy did not seem able to understand this new language designed for a more sophisticated conversation between highly efficient nuclear war machines.

7.

Traditionally, the value of the symbol is precisely in its apparent uselessness as a means of simple communication. It is ordered to communion, not to communication. Because it is not an efficient mode of communicating information, the symbol can achieve a higher purpose of going beyond practicality and purpose, beyond cause and effect. Instead of establishing a new contact by a meeting of minds in the sharing of news, the symbol tells nothing new; it revives our awareness of what we already know, and deepens that awareness. What is “new” in the symbol is the ever new discovery of a new depth and a new actuality in what is and always has been. The function of the symbol is not merely to bring about a union of minds and wills, as a cause produces an effect. The function of the symbol is to manifest a union that already exists but is not fully realized. The symbol awakens awareness, or restores it. Therefore it does not aim at communication, but at communion. Communion is the awareness of participation in an ontological or religious reality: in the mystery of being, of human love, of redemptive mystery, of contemplative truth.

The purpose of the symbol, if it can be said to have a “purpose,” is not to increase the quantity of our knowledge and information, but to deepen and enrich the quality of life itself by bringing man into communion with the mysterious sources of vitality and meaning, of creativity, love, and truth, to which he cannot have direct access by means of science and technique. The realm of symbol is the realm of wisdom in which man finds truth not only in and through objects. but in himself and in his life, lived in accordance with the deepest principles of divine wisdom. Naturally, such wisdom does not exclude knowledge of objects. It gives a new dimension to science. What would our world of science be, if only we had wisdom?

Appreciation of the symbol necessarily implies a certain view of reality itself, a certain cosmology and a religious metaphysic of being, above all a spiritual view of man. Symbols begin to have a creative significance only when man is understood to be a sacred being, a child of God, made in God’s image. The “desecration” of man begins when symbols are emptied of meaning, and are allowed to survive precisely in so far as they are patronizingly admitted to be misleading. but still “necessary for the ignorant.”

The symbol is then regarded only as a politically or religiously “useful lie,” in so far as it seems to communicate information on a childish level, information which is inadequate, but acceptable to those to whom “objective truth” is not yet clear. The “sacredness” of man consists, however, precisely in the fact that the truth for which and by which he lives is primarily within himself, and therefore prime importance belongs to the symbol which directs him to this truth, not as an external object, but as a spiritual awareness and personal plenitude. Without this interior fulfillment, the mind of man is not equipped to cope with objective truth, and the spirit that has no interior roots will find that its “scientific” knowledge of objects turns out to be “a lie” even when it is materially correct. It completely misleads him as to the meaning of his own existence.

8.

Paul Tillich rightly saw that “a real symbol points to an object that can never become an object.” This is a profound and intriguing declaration. The symbol cannot possibly convey information about an object, if it is true to its nature as a symbol. Only when it is debased, does a symbol point exclusively to an object other than itself. The symbol is an object pointing to the subject. The symbol is not an object in which one rests for its own sake. It is a reminder that we are summoned to a deeper spiritual awareness, far beyond the level of subject and object.

It would, however, be a great mistake to think that the symbol merely reminds the subject to become aware of himself as object, after the Western manner of introspection and self-examination. We must repeat, the symbol is an object which leads beyond the realm of division where subject and object stand over against one another. That is why the symbol goes beyond communication to communion. Communication takes place between subject and object, but communion is beyond the division: it is a sharing in basic unity. This does not necessarily imply a “pantheist metaphysic.” Whether or not they may be strictly monistic, the higher religions all point to this deeper unity, because they all strive after the experience of this unity. They differ, sometimes widely, in ways of explaining what this unity is and how one may attain to it.

Christianity sees this unity as a special gift of God, a work of grace, which brings us to unity with God and one another in the Holy Spirit. The religions of Asia tend to see this unity in an ontological and natural principle in which all beings are metaphysically one. The experience of unity for the Christian is unity “in the Holy Spirit.” For Asian religions it is unity in Absolute Being (Atman) or in the Void (Sunyata). The difference between the two approaches is the difference between an ontologist mysticism and a theological revelation: between a return to an Absolute Nature and surrender to a Divine Person.

The symbols of the higher religions may at first sight seem to have little in common. But when one comes to a better understanding of those religions, and when one sees that the experiences which are the fulfillment of religious belief and practice are most clearly expressed in symbols, one may come to recognize that often the symbols of different religions may have more in common than have the abstractly formulated official doctrines.

The Chinese ideogram Chung bears more than a superficial resemblance to the Cross. It is also a picture of the five cosmic points, the four cardinal points centered on the “pivot” of Tao. This is analogous to the traditional Christian cosmic interpretation of the Cross symbol, the “picture” of the new creation and of the recapitulation of all in Christ (Ephesians 1: 12). One might pursue these analogies in studying the traditional Buddhist stupas and so on. It is sufficient to these lines of thought the reader can investigate for himself.

9.

A symbol is then not simply an indicative sign conveying information about a religious object, a revelation, a theological truth, a mystery of faith. It is an embodiment of that truth, a “sacrament,” by which one participates in the religious presence of the saving and illuminating One. It does not merely point the way to the One as object. The symbol does not merely bridge the abyss between man and God, and cause the believer to become united with God. It proclaims that, in one way or another, according to the diversity of religions, the believer can and does even now return to Him from Whom he first came. It does not simply promise a new and effective communication by which the believer can make himself heard by the Deity and can even exercise a certain persuasive force upon Him. It does much more: it opens the believer’s inner eye, the eye of the heart, to the realization that he must come to be centered in God because that in fact is where his center is. He must become what he is, a “son of God,” “seeking only his Father’s will,” abandoned to the invisible Presence and Nearness of Him Who Is, for there is no reality anywhere else but in Him.

But the symbol also speaks to many believers in one: it awakens them to their communion with one another in God. It does not merely bring their minds into communication with one another, in a common worship, for instance. Worship itself is symbolic, and as such it is communion rather than communication. Worship is symbolic communion in mystery, the mystery of the actual presence of Him Who is Being, Light, and Blessedness of Love. It is recognition of the fact that in reality we cannot be without Him, that we are centered in Him, that He dwells in us, and that because He is in us, and we in Him, we are one with one another in Him.

10.

The desecration of symbols cannot be blamed exclusively on the wicked world. On the contrary, it unfortunately began in religious circles themselves. When a tradition loses its contemplative vitality and wisdom, its symbolism gradually loses its meaning, and ceases to be a point of contact with “the center.” Symbolism degenerates into allegorism. The symbol has no life of its own, it merely designates an abstraction. In the system of allegories, everything points to everything else and nothing conclusively ends in real meaning. There is nothing but a circle of references without end. A points to B which points to C which points to A. The center is forgotten.

All that matters is to have a key to the hidden meanings and to know that A really stands for B, so that when you say A you really mean B. But then a scientific critic comes along and says that A does not mean B; that there is no way of knowing that A means anything at all, and all we can say is, that in 500 B.C. A was thought to mean B, while today science shows this interpretation to be impossible.
When the symbol degenerates into a mere means of communication and ceases to be a sign of communion, it becomes an idol, in so far as it seems to point to an object with which it brings the subject into effective, quasi-magical, psychological, or parapsychological communication. It would be pointless here to go into the ancient Biblical polemic against “idols of wood and stone.” There are much more dangerous and much more potent idols in the world today: signs of cosmic and technological power, political and scientific idols, idols of the nation, the party, the race.

These are evident enough, but the fact that they are evident in themselves does not mean that people do not submit more and more blindly, more and more despairingly to their complete power. The idol of national military strength was never more powerful than today, even though men claim to desire peace. In fact, though they pay lip service to the love of life and of humanity, they obscurely recognize that in submitting to the demon of total war they are in fact releasing themselves from the anxieties and perplexities of a “peace” that is fraught with too many ambiguities for comfort. Can man resist the temptation to sacrifice himself utterly and irrevocably to this idol?

Another idol that is not so obvious is that of supposed “spiritual experience” sought as an object and as an end in itself. Here too the temptation that offers itself is one of escape from anxiety and limitation, and an affirmation of the individual self as obiect, but as a special kind of object, to be experienced as free from all limitations.

The temptation of modern pseudo mysticism is perhaps one of the gravest and most subtle, precisely because of the confusion it causes in the minds and hearts of those who might conceivably be drawn to authentic communion with God and with their fellow man by the austere traditional ways of obedience, humility, sacrifice, love, knowledge, worship, meditation, and contemplation. All these ancient ways demand the control and the surrender, the ultimate “loss” of the empirical self in order that we may be “found” again in God.

But pseudo mysticism centers upon the individualistic enjoyment of experience, that is upon the individual self experienced as without limitation. This is a sublime subtlety by which one can eat one’s cake and have it. It is the discovery of a spiritual trick (which is sought as a supremely valuable “object”) in which, while seeming to renounce and deny oneself, one in fact definitively affirms the ego as a center of indefinite and angelic enjoyments.

One rests in the joy of the spiritualized self, very much aware of one’s individual identity and of one’s clever achievement in breaking through to a paradise of delights without having had to present one’s ticket at the entrance. The ticket that must be surrendered is one’s individual, empirical ego. Pseudo mysticism on the contrary seeks the permanent delight of the ego in its own spirituality, its own purity, as if it were itself absolute and infinite. And this explains the success and the danger of the current Western fad for producing “spiritual experience” by means of drugs.

11.

Shall we conclude on a note of pessimism? Not necessarily. The present crisis of man is something for which we have no adequate historical standard of comparison. Our risks are not negligible. The hopes which we have based on our technological skill are very probably illusory. But there remain other dimensions. The fact that we are not able to grasp these dimensions is not necessarily cause for despair. If our destiny is not entirely in our own hands, we can still believe, as did our fathers, that our lives are mysteriously guided by a wisdom and a love which can draw the greatest good out of the greatest evil.

The fact remains that man needs to have something of this mysterious guidance, and enter into active co-operation with it. But such recognition and co-operation cannot really exist without the sense of symbolism. This sense is now to a great extent corrupted and degenerate. Man cannot help making symbols of one sort or another, he is a being of symbols. But at present his symbols are not the product of spiritual creativity and vitality, they are more often the symptoms of a violent illness.

Meanwhile, the final answer does not remain entirely and exclusively in the hands of those who are still equipped to interpret ancient religious traditions. Nor is it in the hands of the scientist and technician. The artist and the poet seem to be the ones most aware of the situation, but they are for that very reason the closest to despair. If man is to recover his sanity and spiritual balance, there must be a renewal of communion between the traditional, contemplative disciplines and those of science, between the poet and the physicist, the priest and the depth-psychologist, the monk and the politician.

If the contemplative, the monk, the priest, and the poet merely forsake their vestiges of wisdom and join in the triumphant empty-headed crowing of advertising men and engineers of opinion, then there is nothing left in store for us but total madness.