It is a curious thing, but the collective will of a community really reveals the basis of the individual will. The early Christian Churches, or communities, revealed quite early a strange will to a strange kind of power. They had a will to destroy all power, and so usurp themselves the final, the ultimate power. This was not quite the teaching of Jesus, but it was the inevitable implication of Jesus’s teaching, in the minds of the vast mass of the weak, the inferior. Jesus taught the escape and liberation into unselfish, brotherly love: a feeling that only the strong can know. And this, sure enough, at once brought the community of the weak into triumphant being; and the will of the community of Christians was anti-social, almost anti-human, revealing from the start a frenzied desire for the end of the world, the destruction of humanity altogether; and then, when this did not come, a grim determination to destroy all mastery, all lordship, and all human splendour out of the world, leaving only the community of saints as the final negation of power, and the final power.
After the crash of the Dark Ages, the Catholic Church emerged again a human thing, a complete, not a half-thing, adjusted to seed-time and harvest and the solstice of Christmas and of mid-summer, and having a good balance, in early days, between brotherly love and natural lordship and splendour. Every man was given his little kingdom in marriage, and every woman her own little inviolate realm. This Christian marriage guided by the Church was a great institution for true freedom, true possibility of fulfilment. Freedom was no more, and can be no more than the possibility of living fully and satisfactorily. In marriage, in the great natural cycle of church ritual and festival, the early Catholic Church tried to give this to men. But alas, the Church soon fell out of balance, into worldly greed.
Then came the Reformation, and the thing started over again: the old will of the Christian community to destroy human worldly power, and to substitute the negative power of the mass. The battle rages today, in all its horror. In Russia, the triumph over worldly power was accomplished, and the reign of saints set in, with Lenin for the chief saint.
And Lenin was a saint. He had every quality of a saint. He is worshipped today, quite rightly, as a saint. But saints who try to kill all brave power in mankind are fiends, like the Puritans who wanted to pull all the bright feathers out of the chaffinch. Fiends!
Lenin’s rule of saints turned out quite horrible. It has more thou-shalt-nots than any rule of ‘Beasts’, or emperors. \ And this is bound to be so. Any rule of saints must be horrible. Why? Because the nature of man is not saintly. The primal need, the old-Adamic need in a man’s soul is to be, in his own sphere and as far as he can attain it, master, lord, and splendid one. Every cock can crow on his own muck- heap, and ruffle gleaming feathers; every peasant could be a glorious little Tzar in his own hut, and when he got a bit drunk. And every peasant was consummated in the old dash and gorgeousness of the nobles, and in the supreme splendour of the Tzar. The supreme master and lord and splendid one: their own, their own splendid one: they might see him with their own eyes, the Tzar! And this fulfilled one of the deepest, greatest, and most powerful needs of the human heart. The human heart needs, needs, needs, splendour, gorgeousness, pride, assumption, glory, and lordship. Perhaps it needs these even more than it needs love: at least, even more than bread. And every great king makes every man a little lord in his own tiny sphere, fills the imagination with lordship and splendour, satisfies the soul. The most dangerous thing in the world is to show man his own paltriness as hedged-in male. It depresses him, and makes him paltry. We become, alas, what we think we are. Men have been depressed now for many years in their male and splendid selves, depressed into dejection and almost into abjection. Is not that evil? Then let men themselves do something about it.
And a great saint like Lenin — or Shelley or St. Francis — can only cry anathema! anathema! to the natural proud self of power, and try deliberately to destroy all might and all lordship, and leave the people poor, oh, so poor! Poor, poor, poor, as the people are in all our modern democracies, though nowhere so absolutely impoverished in life as in the most absolute democracy, no matter how they be in money.
The community is inhuman, and less than human. It becomes at last the most dangerous because bloodless and insentient tyrant. For a long time, even a democracy like the American or the Swiss will answer to the call of a hero, who is somewhat of a true aristocrat: like Lincoln: so strong is the aristocratic instinct in man. But the willingness to give the response to the heroic, the true aristocratic call, gets weaker and weaker in every democracy, as time goes on. All history proves it. Then men turn against the heroic appeal, with a sort of venom. They will only listen to the call of mediocrity wielding the insentient bullying power of mediocrity: which is evil. Hence the success of painfully inferior and even base politicians.
Brave people add up to an aristocracy. The democracy of thou-shalt-not is bound to be a collection of weak men. And then the sacred ‘will of the people’ becomes blinder, baser, and more dangerous than the will of any tyrant. When the will of the people becomes the sum of the weakness of a multitude of weak men, it is time to make a break.
So today. Society consists of a mass of weak individuals trying to protect themselves, out of fear, from every possible imaginary evil, and, of course, by their very fear, bringing the evil into being.
This is the Christian community today, in its perpetual mean thou-shalt-not. This is how Christian doctrine has worked out in practice.