What is the Kingdom of Heaven? (Routledge Revivals)

A. Clutton-Brock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415742566
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317804710
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Written as the First World War was finally drawing to a close, A. Clutton-Brock's reflections on the Kingdom of Heaven examine this challenging theological concept in light of the great religious, political and moral uncertainties thrown up by the conflict. In particular, Clutton-Brock contends that historically Christian orthodoxy has not sufficiently emphasised the role of the Kingdom in salvation, given its importance in the ministry and teaching of Christ. To preserve a religious vision capable of interacting with the modern, industrial world, Christian orthodoxy must carefully consider the scope and importance of political practice, the role of the individual in the realisation of the Kingdom, and the profound implications of reconciling the facts of the universe with the most sincerely held beliefs.

Chapter IV
The Kingdom of Heaven and Politics

HAVING failed to grasp the logic of the Kingdom of Heaven, we have failed also to develop that logic freely in our own minds. Either we have been tied to the words of Christ, or we have rejected them. Believers still quote them as if each saying of His was a law; and unbelievers, naturally impatient at this use of them, suppose that Christ Himself set up to be a mere lawgiver to mankind. But, if you grasp the logic of His doctrine, you will see all His sayings in relation to that logic; you will understand the purpose of their extravagance, which is like the extravagance of a poet's images. In all things Christ Himself was possessed by the logic of that Kingdom of Heaven which He saw; and His aim always was to make others see it, and to live in such a way that they might be of it.

Now the first glimpse of the Kingdom of Heaven makes us aware that it cannot be our private possession, and, further, that each one of us is baulked of it by the failure of others to be aware of it. We cannot be saved separately, but must be saved, if at all, together. Salvation is the salvation of mankind, the entry of mankind into that relation which is the Kingdom of Heaven. Just as a tune is not a tune until all the notes of it are rightly related to each other, so the Kingdom of Heaven is not the Kingdom of Heaven for us until we are all of it. There is implied in the doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven a doctrine of fellowship, which, hitherto, we have enjoyed with our emotions but never grasped with our intelligence. We do desire fellowship; Christ spoke of it constantly; the Early Church was, above all things, a fellowship; William Morris said, " Fellowship is life, and the lack of it is death." But always men have felt rather than thought in terms of it; and their feeling has not led them to sustained and concerted action. There has been between the feeling and the action a lack of the connecting link of thought. We have not that theory of fellowship which we need, if we are to believe in fellowship enough to make it.

History and science, rather than our religion, have taught us that our fate is not private and individual, but common; and they, being divorced from religion, have called it fate rather than purpose; so that the dependence of men on each other seems to us an animal rather than a spiritual thing. We talk of the herd-instinct, not of fellowship. Where Christ says, " Love one another," we say, " Man is a gregarious animal." It is not our desire for the Kingdom of Heaven that seems to make us one, but our own animal past; and the oneness, therefore, is to us often something imposed on us by " Nature," not something that we ourselves desire and will. Nor has our religion superseded this cold and discouraging formula of science with a formula of its own, encouraging and more true.

Religion has not dared to say, what is plain according to the logic of the Kingdom of Heaven, that virtue itself is a quality of society, not merely of the individual. Men are always in a right or a wrong relation to each other; they are, in their nature, like notes, whose function it is to be in that relation which is music; and when they are not in that relation they are nonsense. Further, men, like notes, only become fully themselves when they are in the relation of music to each other; like notes they find themselves, and their very individuality, only in that relation. Out of it they are not themselves, but full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Fellowship is life, and the lack of it is death. That is literally true; for, without that right relation which is fellowship, we cannot perform our human functions at all; each one of us is a chimcera bombinans in vacuo; we waste ourselves on the void. We neither feel, think, nor act rightly.

We may not be aware of this fact about ourselves and in the present; but we have all been amazed at the intellectual and moral perversity of men of the past who seem, in themselves, to have been good men; at the manner in which they have defended the worst iniquities of their time. Their personal goodness could not preserve them from feeling, thinking, and acting wrongly; it was, in fact, unable to function, because they were in a wrong relation with other men, because they were notes without a tune. Marcus Aurelius, Ignatius Loyola, William Wilberforce—we can all see where they were wrong; but they, who were better and wiser than most of us, could not see it; they could not be saved, if the word has any meaning at all, because the society in which they lived was not saved. Either, therefore, we are subject to fate, we are gregarious animals, and the whole content of our minds is but an expression of our herd-instinct; or we can save our own society, can all together enter into that relation which is the Kingdom of Heaven. But it is certain that we cannot enter into it privately and alone, any more than a note can make a tune by itself. And our religion has not affirmed our common power of entering into the Kingdom of Heaven, but has dreamed of private salvation. False to the logic of the doctrine, it has still indulged the egotism of the individual and left the truth, or half of it, to science and history.

Christ Himself could not make the men of His time understand that logic, because they were not capable of conceiving the universal fellowship which alone is the Kingdom of Heaven. To them a Jew was a Jew, and a Gentile a Gentile; and there could be no fellowship between them. So the Kingdom of Heaven, if it meant anything real to them at all, meant a Kingdom of triumphant Jews; as now to the Germans it has meant a Kingdom of triumphant Germans. If Christ was a Messiah, He must be one who would free them from the Romans; and He was crucified because of the obstinacy of their assumption. The mob deserted Him when His arrest convinced them that He was not a national Messiah with supernatural powers; and Pilate was interested only to know whether He claimed to be the King of the Jews. So He refused to defend Himself against this misunderstanding, and died silent.

But this misunderstanding has persisted in one form or another to the present day. Neither His hearers nor Christians now have known what He meant by that saying to the young man who had great possessions: that he must sell all he had and give to the poor. To His hearers it seemed harsh; to us it seems bad political economy. He meant that the young man's riches cut him off from fellowship, put him in a wrong relation with all men, made him futile in all things. We have learned enough political economy, as we call it, to see that the mere selling of goods and giving to the poor is no remedy for poverty; we know that, with society as it is, it would mean giving, not to the poor, but to the rich. But the result of our knowledge is that we are discouraged altogether. Society is such that we cannot achieve any salvation worth having by any individual act; we seem to ourselves to be at the mercy of a process called the struggle for life, and to be occupied with a business which is not our own but " Nature's."

There is always the devil's advocate, without or within us, telling us that our best is not our own but Nature's, and that therefore it is not even good. In the war, for instance, we have beenaware of a new fellowship with each other; but so have the Germans. Our fellowship may seem to us beautiful and holy; but the German fellowship seems to us a mere conspiracy against mankind; or, if we think more scientifically, a product of their herd-instinct. But, if it is that, our fellowship also is a product of our herdinstinct. So, perhaps, some philosopher of the future, examining the conflict of these two fellowships, noting how the members of each said just the same things in praise of their own fellowship and in abuse of the other, will conclude that each, with all the good and bad in it, was but a product of the herd-instinct intensified by war. According to the logic of science, that is to say of the reason when it alone is converted, fellowship is a product of the herd-instinct, not willed by man but imposed on him by Nature for her purposes not his, and to man neither good nor bad in itself.

But, according to the logic of the Kingdom of Heaven, that is to say of the whole nature converted, there is a clear difference between that fellowship which is a product of the herdinstinct and that which is itself an effort to accomplish the Kingdom of Heaven. The former is blind, both for good and evil, because it is exclusive. The members of one herd may attain to a kind of fellowship, with many of the delights and beauties of fellowship; but they exclude the members of the other herd; their fellowship, indeed, is made by their hostility to the other herd, and intensified by it. Virtues are evoked by it, but they remain blind and turn easily to vices. But true fellowship, that which comes of seeing the Kingdom of Heaven and is the effort to accomplish it, is not blind but seeing, and is in its nature and aim not exclusive. It is based on the knowledge that men can be saved only all together; it knows that, so long as any are excluded from it in will or in fact, salvation is impossible.

Within the herd men do attain to fellowship with each other—within the German herd as within ours; for there is in all men a desire for fellowship and a delight in it. But in a fellowship achieved through conflict with another herd there is only emotion, not the logic of the Kingdom of Heaven; and the emotion, lacking that logic, having in it no intellectual conviction, may turn easily from love of friends into hatred of enemies; indeed, the love and the hatred intensify and are confused with each other; the hatred seems a virtue like the love. But the vision and logic of the Kingdom of Heaven give an intellectual conviction to the love, make fellowship, at least in aim, universal.

Without this aim, based on the actual vision of the Kingdom of Heaven, man's society is to man mere nonsense, the good and the bad alike a product of the herd-instinct. For the herd-instinct, even if we seek to explain the whole content of our minds by it, remains to us nonsense in feeling, in thought, and in action. We cannot value anything as soon as we believe it to be a product of the herd-instinct; as products of that instinct we are nonsense to ourselves. We become sense to ourselves only when we have seen the Kingdom of Heaven, and know that the business of all of us is to become a part of it, to accomplish among ourselves that relation which is the Kingdom of Heaven.

The mere seeing of the Kingdom of Heaven makes men long for fellowship; for to see it is to desire to share the sight of it with others. The first result of that desire is art. When a man sees the Kingdom in that relation which we call beauty, he has an instant desire to communicate his sense of that beauty, indeed the beauty itself, to other men; so that he may be not merely a lonely spectator of it, but himself a part of it by sharing it with all men. The very experience of beauty is consummated only in that which we call expression, which is really the communication of what has been experienced; and without that communication the experience is incomplete and leaves the mind thwarted. Art, then, is an effort at fellowship in feeling; and there is nothing of the herd-instinct in it, because there is nothing exclusive—no hatred or fear or rivalry. The artist is not aware of his own herd or another, but only of mankind with which he desires to share his experience. For him there is neither rich nor poor, Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free. In art we all know that we do escape utterly from the herd-instinct; and that is one reason why we value it so highly.

But the logic of the Kingdom of Heaven, which works so freely, almost instinctively, in feeling, works more feebly in our thought, and still more feebly in our action. Because we do not carry it from feeling into thought and action, we think back upon our feelings and read into them the nonsense that is in our action, and so in our thought. Then feeling itself becomes for us a product of the herdinstinct, because we do not give it intellectual conviction by acting upon it. Though we see the Kingdom in beauty, it becomes an illusion to us in thought because we do not act upon it. That fellowship which we do achieve in art is not to us quite real, because we despair of achieving it in our society. It is desired emotionally by all men, but it remains to them merely a matter of emotion while they will not surrender themselves to the logic of it. What beauty tells us we do not believe; the music pleads with us and cuts us to the heart, so long as we will not try to be of it. "In Thy will is our peace;" but the peace seems to us impossible even while we see it, because we will not make the will ours. That we can do, not by feeling and thinking alone, but by acting also; and to act in terms of the Kingdom of Heaven is to act politically.

What is political action? It is the effort of a society to exercise its common will; and the effort itself implies that that society has a common will which can be discovered and acted upon by political means. So there is a logic of politics, often denied or ignored both in theory and in practice. For instance, by politics we often do not mean the exercise of a common will, but rather a conflict between the conflicting wills of different classes. Controversy, of course, may be necessary as a means of discovering the common will, for it is often unconscious or obscured; but there are many who see in politics, not controversy as a means, but oonflict as an end. Politics are to them merely a mitigation of a necessary class war. So also there are those who say that war is always political in its aim. Both are false to the logic of politics, and misunderstand their very nature. All war, whether of nations or of classes, is not political, but a failure of politics and the abrogation of them. It is an attempt, not to exercise a common will, but to impose one will upon another. War is not controversy but violence; and we can think of it as political action only if we have learned to see politics themselves as a conflict in which force is masked.

The aim of politics is not to mask force but to supersede it. If not, why should there be politics? If behind all pretences force must be supreme, if the struggle for life is the ultimate fact of life, why should we wish to mask it? Both politics and diplomacy, in that case, can be but the result of a fear of the struggle carried to an extreme; they can be only activities natural to those who fear defeat in the struggle, products of cunning rather than of'power. But since cunning is to us morally less admirable than power, and fear than courage, our moral judgment, for what it is worth, should be in favour of open war always as against politics and diplomacy. But it is not; for we know that, with continuous open war, any kind of decent life, according to our standards of decency, is impossible. All that we value most in life would be destroyed, would never have come into being, if we lived in continuous open war. Indeed, we should never have attained even to war between nations; we should have remained savages in an incessant war between individuals. Even those who believe that the struggle for life is the ultimate fact of life do all desire some mitigation of it, and do value the results of what they believe to be that mitigation. The man of business who says—Each for himself and the devil take the hindmost—also talks of law and order and the British constitution with respect. He is never consistent; and our actual politics are never consistent. They waver between two theories of politics—the one that politics are a mitigation of the struggle for life, the other that they are an effort to exercise the common will. They are an organized conflict between classes, a conflict of diplomacy rather than war; but there are also ideas and values expressed in them inconsistent with the belief that the struggle for life is the ultimate fact of life. Pity is a force in them and the desire for fellowship, as opposed to mere co-operation in struggle. One party makes concessions to another, not out of mere cunning, but because there are values common to both. Appeals are made, now to self-interest, now to an assumed common and good will. And because of this confusion of appeal and theory all our political ideas and our political action are confused.

We can attain to a consistency of idea and action only if we grasp the logic of politics; only if we understand that they have come into being, not through any desire to mitigate the struggle for life, but through the desire to find the common will and to exercise it. Political machinery and political ideas may be used for other purposes, as for a class struggle; but such a purpose is not, any more than war between nations, itself political. There is a vast gulf between actual politics and the logic of politics, as between the gods men worship and the logic of the idea God. But all actual politics, like all actual theology, have their origin in the logic, and are to be tested by it. In both cases the logic is at first unconscious; there is a blind desire for fellowship or for the love of God; but gradually that desire becomes more conscious and more clearly expressed. Then the consciousness and the clearer expression work more powerfully upon actual theology and actual politics. The logic is practised, and, being practised, becomes itself clearer, And finally we discover, or shall discover, that the logic of politics and of theology is the same. By the same logic we shall reject all idols for the true God and all conflict for the true politics.

And that logic is the logic of the Kingdom of Heaven. It tells us that the struggle for life, as between man and man or class and class or nation and nation, is not of the nature of the universe or of man. It is merely unconverted man's comment on that nonsense universe which is all that he can see. It tells us that politics are, in their nature, an effort of the common will to escape from the struggle for life into the real relation of the Kingdom of Heaven—an effort to act the music which is perceived in the universe. This effort is itself a logical consequence of the perception, as art is the logical consequence of the perception of beauty; and, as the perception of beauty is not consummated until what is perceived is expressed, that is to say communicated, so the perception of the whole Kingdom of Heaven is not consummated except in the political effort to achieve it.

We can justify and understand democracy only by means of the logic of the Kingdom of Heaven. Democracy is an essential part of politics, but not the whole of it. It is an effort to discover and act on the common will; but of itself it has no test by which it can know the common will from other and conflicting wills. That test is given to it only by the logic of the Kingdom of Heaven, which tells us that there is only one common will, namely, for that relation between men which is the Kingdom of Heaven. Other wills may be common to a class or a nation, but they are not common to mankind. So, when democracy exists only to exercise the will of a class or a nation, it is not true to the logic of politics or of the Kingdom of Heaven; it is not true to itself. The effort to discover a common will without the test and the logic of the Kingdom of Heaven is blind. It results merely in counting heads against each other. Vox populi is not vox Dei; but the people can find their voice only in the voice of God; democracy can find its aim only in the Kingdom of Heaven, when it knows that its aim must be concord; and it can find that concord only in the desire for the Kingdom of Heaven.

So the political man is he who believes that the relation of the Kingdom of Heaven may be established among mankind by the common will, that is to say, by political action; while the unpolitical man is he who believes, not in the Kingdom of Heaven, but in the struggle for life as the ultimate fact of life. Between these two there can be no compromise. The unpolitical man has no concern with politics at all; our short name for him is the criminal.

Unfortunately, the plain issue between these two doctrines has b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• I. THE FAILURE OF BELIEF
• II. CHRIST'S DOCTRINE OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
• III. THE LOGIC OF THE DOCTRINE
• IV. THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN AND POLITICS
• V. THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN AND THE INDIVIDUAL
• CONCLUSION