The author of this work would like his readers to read it as one reads a human document. For it has cost him all his life. That may not seem so much in terms of duration. For a human life is an ephemeral thing. But it does mean a considerable amount of pain. And that confers upon any human life a certain dignity: the dignity of pain. No man can be deprived of his share in that dignity.
In this connection, however, the writer also feels the urgent need of making a special confession: he is not only a man; he is an Occidental man.
So he shares the lot of Occidental men--even Occidental men in the twentieth century of the "Christian era". This means--according to his own views--that he suffers, himself, from a tragic lack of that Totality which he has dared to make the topic of his present volume.
However, all is not pitch darkness, of course, in the night of cultural crisis. Disrupted men, for instance, may at least be aware of their disruption. Some may, in fact, be intensely conscious of that mentioned "lack"--that abysmal gulf in the midst of their lives. There may be a correspondingly deep longing in their human breasts to build some kind of bridge across the chasm.
But the pain is not necessarily suspended or relieved for that matter. For even the very building of the "bridges" may be undertaken in a state of abiding super-tension, characterizing not only "Occidental" men, but all isolated and disrupted men, wherever they are and whatever they do.
Perhaps it is rather man as such who suffers from this disruption, man as he is known through all ages and in all lands.
Let it be duly noted by the way: bridge-building is not the consuming passion which has unsettled the mental equilibrium of typical men in the science-minded modern Occident. The great cry here is rather an ever narrower specialization and departmentalization. Obviously, the burning desire of the well-ordered scientific specialist today is, indeed, to "know more and more about less and less". How soon will he reach the extreme end of his present trend? That would be to know "everything about nothing".
We understand perfectly the blame that is bound to come our way: with almost impudent unconcern, and undisturbed confidence in the external world, we launch out towards the wide horizons of new fields of human knowledge, in pursuit of our "lost bridges". How can a man with so little sense of rigid system and scientific limitation avoid losing himself in the bottomless depths of such an unbounded "extroversion"?
We do not deny the dangers of our approach. One ditch is not much better than the other. Ours would be to "know less and less about more and more". How soon will we reach the extreme end of our deleterious trend: that is, to know nothing about everything!
To be sure, there are many pitfalls lying in wait for the over-zealous bridge-builders: they run into more fields than they can properly handle. They "bite off more than they can chew".
But sometimes it also happens that fanciful critics invent fields for them which they themselves had hardly ever dreamt of running into. Benevolent providers assign them tasks which they may have had no ambition whatsoever themselves of assuming. In our case the goals we have actually set for ourselves may be considerably more modest than what some readers would seem to have planned for us.
In fact it is not quite fair to an author--some would say it is a virtual violence exerted against him--to insist the he should produce for instance, "The History of Dualism"--or some sort of standard work on "The Idea of Immortality in the Western World", whereas he himself is satisfied with something infinitely less than this, or perhaps has made plans for something entirely different from this.
The objective of our work is, in its way, a particularly limited one. In the first place, it has been to explore a little further certain conditions for meaningfulness in human lives. In the second place, it has been the very specific task of establishing essential facts about the nature of certain relations between three capital values in human life:
1) Alterocentricity, 2) Totality, 3) Spirituality.
Or, negatively expressed, between:
1) Egocentricity, 2) Disruption, 3) Spiritualism.
Our method used in order to reach these aims was bound to adapt itself, to some extent, to the natural needs of the case at hand. The first step would seem to be to arrive at a deeper insight into the nature of each one of these three values, "in itself". However, this might come close to the illusionism taking place when elements which simply do not happen alone are theoretically abstracted or isolated. Moreover, how is it possible at all to gather further knowledge about qualities of the human spirit? We should like to know. Who would teach us "the trick"?
Of course one may start off with some kind of "definition". But a definition is hardly more than sketching a certain outline. It is not even the first stage of a penetration right into the core of the matter.
Some would no doubt propose a stringently analytical method. Analysis enjoys a formidable prestige in our culture. Whoever chooses--mainly, or occasionally--a merely descriptive method in scientific research, must expect to be looked upon with suspicion. How could simple description, in any case, take the place of subtle analysis?
It is our firm belief, however, that conclusive results in matters of the present kind would have been reached more quickly, and with less risk of error, if we had placed greater confidence in methods of simple observation, description, and juxtaposition. Just placing the data carefully, conscientiously, side by side, and then comparing them, this is what leads to the establishment of truths of the most dependable, the most significant, kind.
In summary retrospect, then: What stands out as the most striking fact that has so far forced itself upon our attention, regarding precisely the relations between Alterocentricity and Totality?
We assume that our readers already have an approximate notion of what the two terms stand for. Who could be a man at all, without an intuitive recognition, right in the core of his everyday life, of what Totality is, and, also, what a lack of that Totality is bound to be!
As for Alterocentricity, that term is more rare. But our definition is easy to grasp: it is the precious gift or the fundamental attitude (in some men, and particularly in a good number of women) of finding the centre of one's life, not in oneself, but outside oneself--so rather in "the other ones", and above all in the "Great Other One"; that is God.
But if two phenomena are most intimately related to each other, by what, then, is their fundamental reality primarily constituted? Is it by the essence each one possesses as a separate entity? No, it is rather by that very relation that exists between them. So our topical question here is still the same: what is the nature of the relation between Alterocentricity and Totality?
We have formulated the answer briefly as follows: at the historic moment when a human being makes the momentous gesture of turning towards the exterior world, towards "the other ones", or the "Other One", that is, towards any genuine value, found outside himself--at that very moment a most remarkable event takes place: he becomes whole.
It is as though some imperious, irresistible command had been pronounced. And all of a sudden the disruption is healed. A disorganized life is being organized. A disintegrated mind is being integrated.
This is what we have pointed out in our conclusion to the volume on Alterocentricity.[1] Although our present book, all alone, forms an independent entity, it is good to prepare its special treatment of the topic of Totality by this glance in retrospect.
Alterocentricity has revealed itself to us as the great organizing force of human totality. (This implies, of course, that egocentricity has, in a corresponding way, revealed itself as the great disorganizing and dis-integrating force in human life, as we currently know it.)
In other words, in his very act of reaching out for the other ones--and above all for the Other One--man finds the power, or the miracle, of becoming whole (and, vice versa: in the very act of enclosing himself in the "I", man becomes inwardly disrupted, lacerated).
Let us illustrate this infallible rule by taking an example from the physics teacher's laboratory: With the attentive student's eager expectation we stand there watching a heap of iron filings. What we see, so far, is not particularly dramatic, however. There is something highly haphazard about the way one of those metal chips turns this way, the other in an entirely different direction; in fact, there could hardly be a better image of disorganization, or inertia and stolid indifference. What we see is a heap, but is it a unit?--I mean in the sense of an organized whole, a living organism? No trace of it. It is all as dead and disrupted as the heap of bones that Ezekiel describes in his 37th Chapter. He saw a whole valley full of them, dry and dreary.
But now back to our mass of iron filings: the physics teacher approaches them with a magnet. And what is the change magically taking place in the amorphous pile at the moment when that magnetic field becomes effective in the vicinity? Each little piece of iron has suddenly begun to behave like a living member of an organic whole. It is almost as though they had all received an imperious command. Like soldiers in an army, they straighten out and line up in the most perfect order, every individual tending in the same direction. If you watch carefully, you may even detect something like converging lines in their mutual pattern of harmonious oneness.
Towards what do they converge? Obviously towards something invisible outside themselves, some curious force of commanding virtue, of life-giving virtue. The dead mass has been transformed into a living body, as it were, an organic totality. They have simply found, outside themselves, something stronger than themselves, something of unifying effect.
On entering a Protestant church building in France, I was surprised one day to see, in the entrance, a strange image carved out by a modern artist. On first view, it might impress the visitor as just another specimen of incomprehensible futuristic art, nothing but a bunch of distorted lines. But very soon you notice that there is something harmonious about those lines. They too have a remarkable trend of converging towards some mysterious centre outside themselves. And right under the carving you read the following text from the Gospel:
"And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to me." (John 12:32)
This is a supreme spiritual formulation of how alterocentricity works the wonder of totality in ordinary human lives. Christ is our unique Other One. At the very moment when the wandering, disrupted gaze of a modern Occidental like you and me finds its rest in Him as the supreme peak of a glorious reality outside himself, the unfathomable thing takes place: the internally split and shattered one becomes whole again. That is the historic event of God's encounter with man.
The conscientious historian of ideas cannot close his eyes to a veritable sacrament of other-centredness as a fundamental motif in Christianity. Here Alterocentricity then grows up to become the Value above all values, nothing less than a worthy synonym for the historic Agape.
But it is the history of a weird Disruption, namely Occidental dualism, that has cast the vague contours of our knowledge about Totality into the sharpest relief. That is why we now turn with great expectations towards the illuminating world of human thought made historically alive. We want more conclusive evidence of the deepest nature of that fascinating Wholeness in man's life, brought about concomitantly with his Elan Altérocentrique. Just the history of ideas, we think, with its dramatic display of conflicting forces in human minds, ought to shed decisive light on elements of this order.
Who knows, in fact, whether Alterocentricity and Totality, on one hand, versus Egocentricity and Disruption on the other, may not constitute batteries of momentous bipolarity in the history of mankind, actually raising them to the rank of fundamental motifs! In other words, why should they not be equal, in destiny-laden significance for the human race, to such gigantic rivals as Agape and Eros, shaking the world to its very foundations, as Anders Nygren has tried to show.
Does this sound boastful? Remember: in historical research, too, what is truly imposing is not the historian; it is history. What is a pitiable little researcher, anyway? Just a grovelling creature, surrounded on all hands by strange empirical data, data not always too comforting to the one who happens to be looking for meaning in human life. It is right in this maze of apparent inconsistencies and more or less hostile facts, that one should imagine us piteously striving to find our way toward some distant light of meaningfulness, after all, a stable foundation which might even prove firm enough to be built upon. Build what? Let us confess our temerity: to build upon it nothing less than a thesis on "Totality in human life".
Finally, just one plea of quite particular frankness and temerity: in order to provide reasonable evidence for the general validity of this daring thesis, we propound what we regard as an inalienable right: we must be allowed to seek data to support our conclusions exactly where we can find them! This means that we may have to linger in certain areas, and dwell upon certain points, with a predilection which might look somewhat disturbing and "arbitrary" to the admirers of impeccably well-proportioned dissertations.
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