on the relationship of God to Man, without regard to the world of relationships that binds us all together in some kind of community, is sheer ignorance. It ignores the experience that the workings of our minds are influenced by our relationships with other people. It would also be a great benefit to me if philosophers and theologians would say what they have to say in simple English; and I have every sympathy with the plea in Michael Faraday’s letter to the young Clerk Maxwell preserved in an account of an evening Meeting of the Royal Institute. It is worth quoting, “There is one thing I would be glad to ask you. When a mathematician engaged in investigating physical actions and results has arrived at his conclusions, may they not be expressed in common language as fully, clearly, and definitely as in mathematical formulae? If so, would it not be a great boon to such as I to express them so? –transporting them out of their hieroglyphics, that we might work on them by experiment”. I agree.
Viewing my book more broadly, I attempt to bring the spiritual world alive. This world includes religion, but much more besides. It includes mountaineering, where the attitude of mind is paramount, particularly in deciding when to go on, and when to turn back because the risks are becoming too big. It also, of course, includes War, where morale is supreme. Napoleon’s verdict was that the moral was to the physical as three to one; and he ought to have known. He meant the morale, the spirit, the esprit de corps of his men. Indeed the spiritual world may be said to reach its apotheosis either in Jesus, or in war such as the Second World War, when Britain was fighting not only for survival but for world freedom as well. The world is a unity; the world of matter and the world of spirit, are one world, not two. The world of conflict, even when it becomes as horrible as battle, and the world of religion are still one and the same creation; and have to be reconciled, unless you want a lop-sided view of life. Canon Raven, regius professor of divinity at Cambridge, in an eloquent passage in his first Riddell lecture to Durhan University in 1935, asks what has been the chief effect of the scientific movement and in particular the fact of evolution on our outlook? And his answer is that we have a knowledge and appreciation of the Universe, that no-one has ever had before, which religion would be foolish to ignore, and which dramatically helps form our concept of the Creator. And He made war a necessity if any civilized life was to be preserved.
I would only add that because the thoughts of the Army commander and of the clergyman are subject to the same analysis, and the same kind of errors, if false assumptions are made, so there is a discipline of thought and action that lies behind their individual self-disciplines. And therefore a reality that transcends both. So neither is in a position to criticise the other, unless he is prepared to enter the other’s frame of mind; and in that event the clergyman would probably find there was nothing to criticise in the Army’s thinking, and a good deal to criticise in his own. In a way it is similar to the Greek idea that fate is more powerful than the gods; or that there is a reality behind radioactive disintegration, when on an atomic scale it is unpredictable. In coining the phrase “Perfectly relaxed consciousness”, I was asserting that there is a world behind the world of thought and belief, behind the world of appearances; although none of us has any idea how this world works. In every direction we seem to come up against a barrier beyond which our efforts to gain knowledge are frustrated.
Of course I hope that the pen is mightier than the sword; but that is in the long term. And I repeat that the only way I can think of solving the problem of War is by fighting. No-one knows why, but during the retreat of our army to Dunkirk, Adolf Hitler ordered his panzer army to halt for 48 hours; had he not done so General Guderian would have got to Dunkirk before we did, and our entire army would have been taken prisoner. Why did Hitler do it? Various suggestions have been made; but one thing surely we can confidently assert, that it was not due to the British peoples’ “love” for Hitler? “Love” does not solve the problem of War; fighting does. And a Church which does not know if it prefers existence to obliteration, is hardly one likely to attract many proselytes. The C.of E. must come to terms with the last war, as it must come to terms with science; or perish.