to sin, evil, crime, violence, war; and forces have to be trained to preserve the peace within a country, and without too. From time to time force must be used, and on occasions ruthless force. Yet as Goethe portrayed at the end of Faust, the use of force always tends to work injustice, because the means employed are human, and humans tend to take short-cuts. So in the story Mephistopheles was able to arrange that the innocent couple, who refused to move, were burned to death in their home. In a sentence, we are condemned to remain in a fallen world.
But it goes further than this. We all know that societies die because they go dead at the centre. Living traditions become meaningless behaviour patterns, until morale collapses because there is nothing within; no convictions, no confidence, no inner integrity. How can such a remorseless process be stemmed or even reversed, except by creating between people an inner communion which does not collapse? On both counts therefore it was sensible to make the attempt to create a sense of communion free from sin, that is to say free from sin not only in its more obvious aspects, but also free from mutual manipulation, or the taking advantage of the one by the other. But how does one persuade another person to leave the seemingly safe paths of convention, and to dare to try to walk on the waters of human passion, which only a god can do, but which every mortal man has to try to do, if he is to remain human? How could anyone start such an adventure thinking he was going to succeed? Yet if no one makes the attempt, what then?
This brief sketch is I hope enough to show the difficulty of the decision. To outline the reasoning by which I decided that the attempt was viable is irrelevant, as I have explained. So it only remains to ask whether I was helped to reach that decision by any psychological or philosophical theory? Of…