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THE TEST OF RESPONSIBILITY
As birth establishes a field of natural and social ownership for the individualized spirit, so does human relationship establish a field of responsibility for those who participate in this relationship. Mutuality in relationship produces new energies and new facts. The new energies must be used — and lack of use is still a negative type of use! The new facts must be met — and shrinking away from them, through fear or inattention, is a negative way of facing what must always be faced, however delayed the acceptation of the challenge of relationship.
Energy is born of relationship. It is produced or released by the interaction of currents of desire or of compassion flowing from the polarities of the universal Whole, as well as from those within human bodies or personalities. Energy is relationship in act. It is the productive "fact" of relationship. Man's attitude towards this fact — the use he makes of it — establishes the character and quality of his participation in society and the universe. Society is what the use it makes of the energy born of human relationship forces it to be. In the problem of personal ownership the two poles of the energy-producing relationship are the individual human spirit and the collective wealth of nature and society. In problems of responsibility the two polarities involved are two human persons, or two groups assuming the legal role of persons.
At the limit, responsibility links man, the individual person, to God, the cosmic person; it links them in an intimacy of relationship which the great mystics alone truly experience, who, in an ecstasy of transcendent mutuality, boldly declare that God needs man, as man needs God. In any case, responsibility implies actually three factors. It implies two parties to a bi-polar relationship considered within the frame of reference of some whole in which the two persons participate, be this whole a business firm, a church, a nation, or the entire universe.
Both parties to the relationship are "responsible", withal in different ways. The manager of the corporation is responsible to the owner or the executive board; but the responsibility of the owner to the manager is just as real. Both types of responsibility have ultimate meaning, moreover, only with reference to the corporation as a whole or to the social community which includes all the participants in the business.
Responsibility is an expression of mutuality in relationship; it is the unavoidable outcome of it. To meet one's responsibility is to see the mutual relationship completely through. This is the great test which all men who enter into any kind of relationship must meet in various degrees. There is no complete, or even no vital experience of relationship if the responsibility for its products is not assumed and discharged; just as there can be no complete individual life without a full use of natural and social possessions. In both cases, objectivity is needed. The individual ego must be objective to his own innate gifts or powers and to the traditional wealth of knowledge or attitudes he acquires during his youth, if they are to be used discriminately and with intelligence. Likewise the partners in any relationship must gain a real perspective on their relationship, if the fruits thereof are to be made to serve significant ends.
The first tests in the two basic fields of the personal and the social life deal respectively with the primary experiences of independent existences (or self) and of relationship (love or partnership); but these original experiences and trials of earth life mark only the beginning of two complementary processes. They lead to two subsequent steps, dealing with the use to which what has been revealed in experience has to be put.
To be, to use, then to understand: these are the three primary phases of human living. Each phase summons forth a basic challenge to the individual human spirit. It leads to tests of strength and creativeness in activity, or of thoroughness and effectiveness of productivity, or of skill and purity in understanding.
Because all types of activity in our world of concrete manifestation are inherently four-fold, being, use and understanding operate in four basic directions. No man can truly "be" unless he be a creative origin, a stable organism whole, a polarity in various kinds of mutual responsibilities, and a functional participant in a larger whole. "Being" must forever be proven through use, and defined through limits and characteristic meaning. Then only can come the Consummatum Est which crowns any complete human victory. Only then is man ready for the Resurrection — man emerging as Son of God through nature overcome and illumined.
At the core of any relationship is the principle of polarization. Wherever two elements enter into relationship one kind or another of polarization is established. It may be the electrical type of polarization expressed in atomic particles such as protons and electrons, or the biological type manifesting in sexual factors, or the social type found wherever leader and led, manager and workmen are related in productive work or in economic-political strife. Even where apparently unpolarized factors are discerned, as the neutron in the atom's nucleus, these can still be said to polarize space itself or unorganized substance. All these types of polarization have one common character; they make change, transformation and progression possible.
Sex, for instance, is the variant-producing factor in all that lives. Reproduction through division and multiplication of one single cell is a static kind of process. As two hereditary lines blend in bi-polar sexual fecundation, each with an infinitely complex and inclusive past, a "mystery" is set into dynamic operation. The creative newness of the "moment" is expressed in form. God, who is eternal and constant creativity, utters Himself in a new gesture and tone of life.
The Eternal Creative performs through sex, and in varying degrees through any polarized relationship, because polar union opens the door to the new variation — to the mystery. God is substantiated in renewal, not in sameness: in adventure, not in conservative acts. There is no divinity, no human genius, no real greatness anywhere, except through that which releases the new, the yet-to-become, the yet-to-be-known. God is always the yet-to-be-known; for, as Oliver Reiser said, "When God is known He becomes man".
The secret core of this challenge of the earth of man and woman, to the genius and his community, to the leader and his people, is the command to make God a man. It is the challenge of Incarnation — the challenge to assume the responsibility for this incorporation of divinity into a new human fact — a grave, solemn, often tragic responsibility. The challenge is to both participants in the relationship; to the "woman" pole, that there should be in her a vibrant, calling forth expectancy of the new man, yet-unknown God — to the "man" polarity, that there should be in him positiveness, definiteness, purity, vision, courage, and the indomitable will to be of God in the very midst of chaos.
To be responsible is to assume the burden of a new birth, of a new venture, of a new fact. Responsibility rests upon both parents of a child; upon the inventors of a new process and the discoverers of a new truth, but also upon the society which conditioned and defined their opportunity to invent and discover by its needs, its desires, its expectations, its vices as well as its virtues. Responsibility for the atomic bomb is upon the scientists who produced it, but as much upon the American society and the whole Western world that sought after it for destruction. And no man can "wash his hands" of responsibility by refusing to face it, or by forcing it — cleverly or crudely — upon others who, in blindness, may willingly accept it.
Every human situation implies responsibility; it reveals or conceals a relationship between individuals or groups, and no one can evade it who is implied in the relationship — which means, ultimately, every human being that has been, is or ever will be. Every human situation is an inescapable challenge to human renewal and human creativeness. Every act of living among men, or even in the universe, involves responsibility for whoever acts; and to refuse to act is only acting negatively.
For the spirit destined to be human, to refuse to be born was (at the beginning of man's evolution) to let evil enter the earth through the spiritually unguided (thus meaningless) proliferations of material animal organisms. To refuse to create when the call rises from the waters of chaos is, at any time, unconsciously to accept the responsibility for decay and death. This is the ultimate as well as the truly original "sin". Evil is born of the refusal of responsibility. This refusal compels those who made it to assume, in tragedy, the responsibility for evil.
Every man is responsible for evil who fails to assume the responsibility of any situation and any relationship in which he was and is a participant. Thus is "karma" born. Every man bears the karma of himself and his community. Every man bears the sins of all humanity, for he is always and forever a partner to everything human and he is implicated in all births and in all abortions. Karma is not produced so much by a wrong kind of action as by the type of action which derives from a refusal to perform creative acts, when the need for them had come. Karma is caused by a denial — conscious or unconscious — of the creative potentiality of the moment by those who live that moment.
As a moment of time is left un-expressed by the living spirit in man, this spirit must become a slave of more time. Every spiritual monad must reincarnate as long as it fails to incorporate in creative acts the creative power of every moment it is incarnate. To create is the incessant responsibility of the spirit in and through embodied man, because creation is simply the fulfillment, by the spirit, of the
potentiality inherent in every moment of time. Time is God's compassion for chaos; and man is the agency through which this compassion must operate in terms of creative acts.Creation is the fruition of relationship; and "In the beginning" — that is, the birth of time out of eternity — the one relationship is that of spirit to matter. Matter is the unredeemed past, the manure of the universe that was, the chaos of disassociated elements which could not reach integration and fulfillment. Spirit is the potential of all conceivable futures. This potential of futurity alone can redeem matter. It alone can cause matter in chaos to be gathered once more
through a world process creative of cosmos, toward the goal of integration. This process of ingathering and eventual integration of material elements is evolution.Evolution predicates form; that is, structures within which the process of integration, refinement and transmutation can operate. And, metaphysically speaking, "Man" in any universe is the basic as well as ultimate Form. He is the universal Paradigm, the operative Logos, in and through whom spirit relates itself to material elements ready for this union. To prepare the way for this fulfillment of relationship is the cosmic task of man.
It is a cosmic task, and it is also an everyday task to be performed in the humblest way, in the lowliest circumstances. Indeed, it is performed most intimately and most effectively where material elements need it most, where there is the greatest darkness and the most disintegrating conflicts. Thus Jesus, the Christ, was born in a manger, in the town of Beth (the feminine principle), in a land rigid with formalism, in a race that extolled the ego in the blood, the Saturnian Jehovah.
Upon Jesus was the responsibility of Christhood: the responsibility of wedding the spirit of creative newness to the egocentric, race-worshipping, passionate type of personality which the Jewish culture bred under conditions of rigid dogmatism. But not upon him alone. It had to be shared by the Jews, the negative pole of the relationship; as later Rome and the Caesars had to share the responsibility of Christianity.
Jewish culture produced a Paul, who permeated the Gospel of eternal creative newness through simple. God-illumined, personal acts with the formalism of the Mosaic tradition and the collective emotionalism of a defeated people; and Rome made Christianity Roman and imperialistic. Catholic and stultified by dogma. Matter had pulled spirit to its heaving bosom; and spirit shone no longer, except through a few great mystics and through the stones and liturgies of sky-flung cathedrals which made of the simple light of Christhood a tragic chiaroscuro of sin and redemption by blood.
Upon every man is the responsibility of Christhood; upon every woman the responsibility of being one of the Marys — each according to her own temperament and inner virtue, but also upon every community and every nation is the responsibility of summoning forth in collective consciousness and faith Christs and Marys. The responsibility is not the individual's alone; neither is it the collectivity's alone. Responsibility is born of relationship; it is the fulfillment of relationship within the larger whole of life in which those that are related participate.
For this reason, the love of man and woman does not only blend their energies and their souls. It relates them to the community and to the universe. For this reason, no corporation that weaves the activities of managers and workers into a pattern of production can remain alone and self-sufficient in society; it is responsible to and with society. Always and everywhere mutuality is the keynote; and mutuality proves itself in jointly assumed and joyously discharged responsibility. It blossoms out in significance.
