Chapter XV ETHICS
Every cosmology has its correlated ethic. The ethic that is correlated with the cosmology outlined in the preceding chapter has, as its fundamental principles, these propositions: Good is that which makes for unity; Evil is that which makes for separateness. Relating these terms to the phraseology employed in the first chapters, we can say that separateness is attachment and that without non-attachment no individual can achieve unity either with God or, through God, with other individuals. In the paragraphs that follow I shall try to illustrate the application of our ethical principles in life.
Good and evil exist on the plane of the body and its sensations, on the plane of the emotions, and on the plane of the intellect. In practice these planes cannot be separated. Events occurring on one of the planes have their counterpart in events occurring upon the other planes of our being. It is always necessary to bear this fact in mind when we classify phenomena as physical, emotional or intellectual. But provided that we bear it in mind, there is no harm in our speaking in this way. This particular classification, like every other, fails to do full justice to the complexities of real life; but it has the compensating merit of being very convenient.
Let us begin by considering good and evil on the plane of the body. In general it may be said that any very intense physical sensation, whether pleasurable or painful, tends to cause the individual who feels it to identify himself with that sensation. He ceases even to be himself and becomes only a part of his body—the pain-giving or pleasure-giving organ. Self-transcendence thus becomes doubly difficult—though of course by no means impossible, as is proved by many examples of equanimity and non-attachment under suffering and under intense enjoyment. In general, however, excess of pain as of pleasure makes for separateness. All the oriental contemplatives are emphatic in their insistence on bodily health as a condition of spiritual union with ultimate reality.
Among Christians there are two schools of thought—that which recommends mortification and that which stresses the importance of health. Pascal may be cited as a representative of the first school, and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing as a representative of the second. For Pascal, sickness is the truly Christian condition; for, by mechanically freeing men from some, at least, of the passions, it delivers them from all manner of temptations and distractions, and prepares them for living the kind of life which, according to Christian ethical theory, they ought to live. Pascal ignores the fact that sickness may create as many temptations and distractions as it removes—distractions in the form of discomfort and pain, temptations in the form of an almost irresistible impulse to think exclusively of oneself.
There is, however, an element of truth in the Pascalian doctrine. When not excessive, sickness or physical defect may act as a reminder that ‘the things of this world’ are not quite so important as the animal and the social climber in us imagine them to be. A mind which has made this discovery and which then succeeds, as a result of suitable training, in ignoring the distractions of pain and overcoming the temptation to think exclusively of its sick body, has gone far to achieve that ‘suprarational concentration of the will,’ at which the religious self-education aims. In proclaiming the value of sickness, Pascal is advocating the physiological method of training through the mastery of pain. We have seen already that this method is a dangerous one. Only too frequently pain is not mastered, but achieves mastery—leads to attachment rather than non-attachment.
This being so, we can understand why the author of The Cloud of Unknowing should have taken the opposite view to Pascal’s. For him, sickness is a serious obstacle in the way of true devotion to God and must be reckoned accordingly as a form of sin. The passage in which he comments on certain symptoms of what we should now call ‘neurosis’ is of such interest that I make no excuse for quoting it in its entirety. ‘Some men,’ he writes, ‘are so cumbered in nice curious customs in bodily bearing that when they shall aught hear, they shall writhe their heads on one side quaintly, and up with the chin: they gape with their mouths as they should hear with their mouth and not with their ears. Some when they should speak point with their fingers, or on their own breasts, or on theirs that they speak to. Some can neither sit still, stand still, nor lie still, unless they be either wagging with their feet, or else somewhat doing with their hands. Some row with their arms in time of their speaking, as they needed to swim over a great water.
Some be ever more smiling and laughing at every other word that they speak, as they were giggling girls and nice japing jugglers. . . . I say not that all these unseemly practices be great sins in themselves, nor yet all these that do them be great sinners themselves. But I say if that these unseemly and unordained practices be governors of that man that doth them, insomuch that he may not leave them when he will, then I say that they be tokens of pride and curiosity of wit, and of unordained showing and covetyse of knowing. And specially they be very tokens of unstableness of heart and unrestfulness of mind, and specially of the lacking of the work of this book’ (i.e. the work of meditation as a training for the mystic experience).
This assimilation of physical deficiency to sin may seem somewhat ruthless and unfeeling. But if sin is to be judged by its results, then, of course, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing is quite right in reckoning among sins any bodily states and habits which cause a man to concentrate on his own separateness, hinder him from paying attention to his true relation with God and his fellows and so make the conscious actualization of union with them impossible. On the plane of the body, sickness must generally be counted as a sin. For by sickness and pain as well as by extreme pleasure, the body insists on its separateness and all but compels the mind to identify itself with it.
The saying that to him that has shall be given and from him that has not shall be taken away even all that he has, is a hard one; but it happens to be an extremely succinct and accurate summary of the facts of moral life. Those who sin physically by having some kind of bodily defect may be made to pay for that defect in ways that are emotional and intellectual as well as physical. Some sick people are capable of making the almost superhuman effort that will transform the disaster of bodily defect into spiritual triumph. From the rest even that which they have, intellectually and emotionally, is taken away.
Why? Because, on the plane of the body, they are among those who have not. ‘Men may be excusable,’ says Spinoza, ‘and nevertheless miss happiness, and be tormented in many ways. A horse is excusable for being a horse and not a man; nevertheless he must needs be a horse and not a man. He who cannot rule his passions, nor hold them in check out of respect for the law, while he may be excusable on the ground of weakness, is nevertheless incapable of enjoying conformity of spirit and knowledge and love of God; and he is lost inevitably.’ Weakness may be forgiven; but so long as it continues to be present, no amount of forgiveness can prevent it from having the ordinary results of weakness. These results are manifest in the present life and, if there should be some form of survival of bodily death, will doubtless be manifest in any subsequent existence.
Sex is a physical activity that is also and at the same time an emotional and an intellectual activity. If I choose to consider it here, it is not because I regard it as more physical than emotional or intellectual, but merely for the sake of convenience. It is an empirical fact of observation and experience that sexual activities sometimes make for a realization of the individual’s unity with another individual and, through that other individual, with the reality of the world; sometimes, on the contrary, for an intensification of individual separateness. In other words, sex leads sometimes to non-attachment and sometimes to attachment, is sometimes good and sometimes evil.
On the plane of the body, sex is evil when it takes the form of a physical addiction. (All that can be said in this context about sex is true, mutatis mutandis, of the other forms of physical addiction—to alcohol, for example, to morphia and cocaine.) Like habit-forming drugs, habit-forming sex is evil because it compels the mind to identify itself with a physical sensation and prevents it from thinking of anything but its separate animal existence. Addiction cannot be destroyed by satiation, but tends, if indulged, to become more than
