The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (39 page)

The slapstick comedy of the early silent films was in the spirit of Beckett’s absurd, which itself was in the tradition of the ancient mimes and medieval clowns and jesters. All these comic forms showed the dramatic power of wordless and purposeless action. Vladimir and Estragon reflect Laurel and Hardy; a version of Charlie Chaplin appears as Hamm in
Endgame
(1957); and Buster Keaton himself played in
Film
(1964). A feeling for the absurd allowed Beckett to see the comic where others saw only the meaningless. And so Beckett arrays the trivia of everyday life to entertain us with a patient depiction of the human condition. Which made Beckett’s insights perfectly suited to the ancient cathartic role of the theater.

With his feeling for the absurd it is not surprising that Beckett was fascinated by the mystery of time. His first separately published work was on the subject. During his first stay in Paris a prize of ten pounds was offered by Nancy Cunard and Richard Aldington for the best poem on the subject of time. Beckett’s prizewinning poem, which he piquantly titled “Whoroscope,” focused on his favorite philosopher, Descartes, reflecting on time, hens’ eggs, and other miscellany. It was published in 1930 in an edition of one hundred signed copies at five shillings and two hundred unsigned at a shilling. Beckett, then, was naturally fascinated by Proust, on whom he wrote one of the first full-length studies—a critical essay (published in 1931) focusing on Proust’s exploration of time. Time, as he wrote in his essay on Proust, would somehow give Beckett a key to novelty in the absurd ocean of experiences. This suggested, too, a theme of
Waiting for Godot.
The subject of the play, as often observed, was not Godot, but
waiting,
a habitual encounter with time. According to Beckett:

Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals. . . . Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects. The periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptations . . . represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious, and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being.

A WORLD IN PROCESS: THE MEANING IN THE SEEKING

But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail. . . . no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself.

—OSCAR WILDE,
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
(1891)

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and science.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN,
WHAT I BELIEVE
(1930)

Acton’s “Madonna of the Future”

The eloquent prophet of the modern liberal spirit, Lord Acton (1834-1902), would poignantly refer to his unfinished lifework—a history of liberty—as “The Madonna of the Future.” This was the title of Henry James’s story of an artist who devoted his life to a single great painting, but at the artist’s death the easel in his studio showed only a blank canvas. While this way of describing Acton’s history was delightfully ironic, it was also wonderfully true to the liberal spirit to which he gave his life and his writing. His history of liberty has been described as “the greatest book that was never written.” Yet Acton became one of the most influential and most often quoted of the historians of his age.

Acton’s life and work (and nonwork) included numerous lectures, essays, and reviews on historical subjects, but he never wrote a book. It was significant, too, that while he authored unforgettable aphorisms (for example, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”), which have attained the authority of cliché, he is not famous for his theories of history. One of the most vigorous and relentless Seekers, he remained vividly aware of the burden and the promise of his Western inheritance. There was no more strenuous, nor more frustrated effort to reconcile the ancient doctrines of Christianity with the modern doctrines of liberalism. And, although Acton saw the rise of liberty as the grand theme of human history, he was a divided soul, a Seeker who would not abandon either path of his quest.

Born into an age that was dissolving the certitudes of Christianity, Acton still dared not abandon them. His life, he once said, was “the story of a man who started in life believing himself a sincere Catholic and a sincere Liberal; who therefore renounced everything in Catholicism which was not compatible with Liberty and everything in Politics not compatible with Catholicism.” He was the perfect embodiment of the Seeker—too Catholic to renounce the wisdom of the past and too searching not to follow the inquiring spirit of his age. But he never retreated into the comforting dogmas of either past or present. There was never a more devoted acolyte of ideas, nor a more scrupulous attender to “the little fact that makes the difference.” As he once said of his mentor Döllinger, “He knew too much to write.” Always discouraged by the imperfection of the material, he always delayed his unifying work by the promise of new facts and new ideas still to come.

Acton’s life and inheritance were designed to make his mind a battleground. Born into a cosmopolitan, aristocratic family, he inherited his Catholicism. His family had been converted to Catholicism in the eighteenth century and they saw that his education was supervised by leading Catholics. Schooled at the English Catholic school of Oscott, which had been a center of the Catholic Revival, near Oxford, which was the center of the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement, he was refused admission by three Cambridge colleges that did not welcome Catholics. In 1850 he was sent to Munich, then noted for its Catholic scholarship. There he was privately tutored by Professor Johann Ignaz von Döllinger (1799-1890), an independent-minded priest and historian, whose disciple he remained for thirty years.

From Döllinger, Acton inherited the idea of “developmental” Christianity. To reconcile history and theology, Christianity was conceived not as a set of dogmas but as a historical growth. But for Catholics in Acton’s generation the conflict between dogma and the seeking spirit—between orthodoxy and liberty—was not to be so easily dismissed. As editor of the liberal Catholic monthly
The Rambler,
Acton tried to apply the developmental idea, but soon met papal opposition and had to discontinue publication (1864).

The issue was posed more dramatically and more deliberately than Acton had imagined when the imperious Pope Pius IX (1792-1878; pope, 1846-78) called the first Vatican Council (1869-70) to confront the conflict between traditional doctrine and the rising currents of liberalism. His would be the longest pontificate in history, and one of the most contentious. Though dominated by the papal bureaucracy, it was only after heated opposition that the Vatican Council promulgated the dogma of papal infallibility. “The bishops entered the council shepherds,” the historian William Lecky observed from Rome, “they came out of it sheep.” When Döllinger protested and refused to accept the dogma, he was excommunicated. Acton himself persuaded the prime minister Gladstone to protest the new dogma, and published his own attack on infallibility. But when Archbishop Manning supported the doctrine and confronted Acton, he reconsidered, and so was not excommunicated.

It is no wonder that Acton’s great work, his history of liberty, remained a “Madonna of the Future”—never finished, and never really begun. For he remained a passionate, always unfulfilled Seeker. His need for personal faith he satisfied in Catholic Christianity, but for the whole human experience he found no dogma adequate. His idea of liberty was a way of describing the endless quest. Faith in liberty as the human destiny made every event a chapter of the larger history he never wrote. All his lectures and essays became part of that story.

Believing in the right to unbelief, he saw liberal faith as a bulwark against persecution, while religion was not. Though he detested persecution, yet he was unwilling to abandon his Catholic faith. Instead, he used his agile mind and historical detail to defend his personal faith while condemning Catholic acts of persecution throughout history. Acton’s inward conflicts have been sensitively described by Gertrude Himmelfarb, who recounts the dynamics of his compromise. With a tortured historical argument, he elaborated in his essays his distinction between the Catholic and the Protestant theories of persecution—in which the Protestant theory came off much the worse. “The principle on which the Protestants oppressed the Catholics was new. . . . Catholic intolerance is handed down from an age when unity subsisted, and when its preservation, being essential to that of society, became a necessity of State as well as a result of circumstances. Protestant intolerance, on the contrary, was the peculiar fruit of a dogmatic system in contradiction with the facts and principles on which the intolerance actually existing among Catholics was founded. Spanish intolerance has been infinitely more sanguinary than Swedish; but in Spain, independently of the interests of religion, there were strong political and social reasons to justify persecution without seeking any theory to prop it up. . . .”

Catholic persecution, he argued, was no more than the enforcement of public morality, while Protestant persecution was the pure inhibition of freedom of religious thought, illustrated by the case of Servetus, whom Calvin had burned at the stake: “Servetus was not a party leader. He had no followers who threatened to upset the peace and unity of the Church. His doctrine was speculative, without power or attraction for the masses, like Lutheranism; and without consequences subversive of morality, or affecting in any direct way the existence of society, like Anabaptism.” Thus, as Himmelfarb observes, while Catholic persecution was more bloody as the instrument of prevailing morality, Acton argued that “the Protestant persecution was more soul-corrupting.”

Obsessed by the need to find coherence, order, and unity in all human history, Acton imagined that unity might be found in a history of liberty. Yet all he could achieve was a bouquet of brilliant insights into epochal movements and revolutions. He offered these in his
Lectures on the French Revolution,
his
Lectures on Modern History,
his “Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History,” and miscellaneous essays. His insights were diffuse, atomistic, and inconsistent.

Acton was hostile to the American abolitionists, who championed “an abstract idea” even at the cost of disrupting society. The American abolitionists, he argued, were the real enemies of the Constitution. They appealed to an abstraction and the passing whim of the majority against established institutions. “The influence of these habits of abstract reasoning, to which we owe the revolution in Europe, is to make all things questions of principle and of abstract law . . . and the consequence is that a false and arbitrary political system produces an arbitrary code of ethics, and the theory of abolition is as erroneous as the theory of freedom.”

So Acton saw uncontrolled democracy, too, like absolute monarchy, as the enemy of liberty. “The true democratic principle, that none shall have power over the people, is taken to mean that none shall be able to restrain or to elude its power. . . . The true democratic principle, that every man’s free will shall be as unfettered as possible, is taken to mean that the free will of the collective people shall be fettered in nothing.” But there was a higher law, which was not the mere will of the majority. This was the faith of “the Stoics who emancipated mankind from its subjugation to despotic rule, and whose enlightened and elevated views of life bridged the chasm that separates the ancient from the Christian state, and led the way to freedom. Their test of good government is its conformity to principles that can be traced to a higher legislator. That which we must obey, that to which we are bound to reduce all civil authorities, and to sacrifice every earthly interest, is that immutable law which is perfect and eternal as God Himself, which proceeds from His nature, and reigns over heaven and earth and over all the nations.”

The historian’s function, Acton insisted in his Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor, is “to keep in view and to command the movement of ideas, which are not the effect but the cause of public events.” Yet Acton’s own history was a tale of concrete human experience, of human weakness and human hopes, which he noted:

Use of history—no surprises. He [the historian] has seen all this before. He knows what constant and invariable forces will resist the truth and the Higher Purpose. What weakness, division, excess, will damage the better cause. The splendid plausibility of error, the dazzling attractiveness of sin. And by what adjustment to inferior motives good causes succeed. . . . History is not a web woven with innocent hands. Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and the most active.

Although Acton would be popularly known for his aphorisms about power and its perils, he saw an antidote to power. The dynamic in history—a tireless struggle against the power of original sin—came from communal seeking for the modern mode of progress. Acton gave it the name of revolution.

“Liberalism,” Acton insisted, “wishes for what ought to be, irrespective of what is,” and is “essentially revolutionary. . . . Facts must yield to ideas. Peaceably and patiently if possible. Violently if not.” “The supreme conquests of society are won more often by violence than by lenient arts. . . . If the world owes religious liberty to the Dutch Revolution, constitutional government to the English, federal republicanism to the American, political equality to the French and its successors, what is to become of us, docile and attentive students of the absorbing Past? The triumph of the Revolutionist annuls the historian.”