He lays up treasure, and knows not for whom he gathers it. Folly and vanity ! Blessed is the man whose hope is the Lord, who has not cast his eyes on vanities and on lying follies (Ps. xxxix, 5). ‘Wild talk, ‘you think (I speak to one who has a hankering for treasure himself); ‘such words are nothing but old wives’ tales.’ You are a careful, sensible man; every day you devise new means of money-making—from business, from farming, perhaps from pleading and legal practice, perhaps from soldiering; and there is usury besides. You are shrewd; you use every art you know to add coin to coin and to enclose your gainings in jealous secrecy. Robbing others, you are anxious not to be robbed yourself; you fear to suffer the wrong you do, though your suffering does not amend your doing. But of course, with you there is no suffering; you are a cautious man, and as good at keeping as at getting; you know where to place your wealth, with whom to trust it, how none of your gathering need be lost. Well, I ask you in your shrewdness and carefulness : Granted your gathering and storing are proof against any loss, tell me for whom you store your treasure. There are other evils that go with this vanity of your covetousness; these I leave; I neither stress them nor tax you with them. The one point I make, the one question I put, is that brought up by the reading of the psalm. Granted, you gather and lay up treasure.

We are used to hearing the present age in the Church’s history described as the age of catholic action: there is a possibility that we may not sufficiently realize that catholic action essentially demands and implies catholic contemplation. By catholic action we mean the sharing, by the laity, in Christ’s redeeming work in and for the world: trying to make known the truth entrusted to the Church, trying to create a Christian order of society, trying to reclaim for men and women those fundamental rights and duties which our Lord came to teach the world and which the world has so largely lost. But all this work, and every part of it, implies the need of contemplation; and if the contemplation is lacking, the action will not achieve much lasting good. Misguided benevolence can do almost as much harm in the long run as sheer wickedness; and action without contemplation is blind.

Action of any sort is blind without contemplation of some sort. The symphony played on the concert platform is significant only if it expresses an artist’s vision; the military campaign would be military chaos without the precedent thought of the strategist. And the need of contemplative vision becomes greater as the aim of given action is more important for humanity: the artist whose material is stone or paint must be a contemplative, but it is still more important that the maker whose material is human flesh and blood should be a contemplative; and when you come to those whose material is the souls of men and women you come to the greatest need of contemplation of all.

We must begin by recognising this fact: the Church is not concerned about culture. The Church can only be defined by her fidelity to a mission—that which was given by her founder. And this mission is not a command to be cultured, it is to save. “How is a man the better for it, if he gains the whole world at the cost of losing his own soul?” As for that “soul”, we must lose it if we would gain it. All the riches of the world, the triumphs of the flesh as well as the triumphs of the spirit, count for nothing in the kingdom of God, which is for the poor. We should be more than happy to sell everything in order to gain that single pearl. Go, teach, baptise. Not “baptise” Plato or Aristotle, literature or art, the community or the human personality, but baptise (without inverted commas) all mankind. It is not a matter of “assuming values”: it is rather the salvation of our brethren.

“So it was, brethren, that when I came to you and preached Christ’s message to you, I did so without any high pretensions to eloquence, or to philosophy. I had no thought of bringing you any other knowledge than that of Jesus Christ, and of him as crucified”. (I Cor. 3. i-v).

It is the last hour before Ash Wednesday. Only a little while ago I said the Office of Compline, and the calm of prayer is still upon me. The day has been heavy with many duties, but I was glad to bear them. There is so little we can suffer for him who suffered so willingly for us. The fire on my left is burning steadily. It will have to last the whole night, for we are fire-watching, my companion and I, and it is my turn to wake. She is sleeping peacefully, this dear young girl, and her gentle breathing is a solace to me.

I have been thinking of many things to-night, my friend, and>my heart is very full. Here I am fire-watching, waiting for one of my people to come and bring destruction upon-your people, to ruin their homes, mutilate their limbs, even to kill them. The first time was in an air-raid I was lying-flat on my back in a strange bed and the aeroplanes were droning overhead. I knew they had come for a fell purpose, and I thought of the untold thousands who were threatened by a similar danger both here and in Germany. As I opened my heart to their sufferings I could believe for a moment it were possible to embrace both countries with an equal love. For one night at least in the face of that deadly menace, I seemed to bear the agony of both, and there was neither friend nor foe, only a communion of suffering under a mighty cross.

The whole question of the moral aspect of psychotherapy is, it seems to me, a vast and intricate one, and one which has as yet been given little serious and thoroughgoing consideration. This is due in part to the fact that contemporary psychotherapeutic theory and practice is in so variegated, amorphous and contradictory a state that few generalisations about it are possible, let alone any critical examination of it as a whole in the light of any body of ethical principles. It is possible, indeed, to take the written works of a given writer on psychological theory and methods and to subject them to ethical scrutiny, and a certain amount of work of varying merit has been done in this direction; work which is itself, perhaps, by no means impervious to serious criticism. But even such work as this, within its own inevitable limitations, is not always very practically helpful. The theoretical expositions of psychologists and the accounts which they give of their methods are not infrequently both better and worse than their actual practice; and in any case do not afford very adequate material for judgment and discussion on the part of those who themselves lack either active or passive psychotherapeutic experience.

But the practical urgency of the problem is too acute to allow us to wait indefinitely for some decisive and all-inclusive ethico-psychotherapeutical synthesis. The problem is brought home to most of us in its most challenging and concrete form when the question arises of committing ourselves or others to psychological treatment. Do we not, in doing so, risk the undermining of our moral principles, perhaps of our religion and our faith? Rumours have reached us, perhaps, of alleged psychotherapists who, after long and costly weeks of treatment, prescribe some such homely old palliatives as a dose of fornication, divorce, cutting loose from hearth and home, or some other form of uncleanness, injustice or impiety.

Arthur Koestler is a writer of great intelligence and strong convictions, who has for years been carrying on a single-handed fight against that modern mechanical mystery of ingenuity, the Totalitarian State. He fights alone because he is a writer of the Left, even of the extreme Left, who refuses to accept the myths and rationalizations of his party and is just as outspoken in his condemnation of the totalitarianism of the Left as he is of the totalitarianism of the Right. He fights alone, also because he feels acutely the spiritual tragedy of modern man and the need for spiritual reintegration, and yet rejects any positive religious solution of the problem. His diagnosis of the situation is expressed in the title of his book)—the polar opposition of the passive contemplation of the naked Indian ascetic and the ruthless activism of the Communist bureaucrat.

No doubt the opposition is psychologically justifiable in terms of the pure introvert and the pure extravert, but I do not feel that it really fits the modern situation, and particularly that aspect of the situation to which Koestler devotes so much of the present volume. For what he is mainly concerned with is not the opposition of action and contemplation, but rather the frustration of the modern intelligence in a world which it has done so much to create. The revolutionary intelligence created the Marxian ideology, which in turn produced the Communist State. But something has gone wrong in the process. The intellectuals believed and taught that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat would be followed by the “withering away” of the State. In fact, however, what has happened has been the development of a State power more absolute than any absolutism of the past, and it has been the intelligentsia which has “withered away”.