Perennial Phil Ch 5 CHARITY [11,5695]

Perennial Phil Ch 5 CHARITY [11,5695]

05 최고의 사랑 - 모든 오류는 사랑의 부족에서 생긴다

He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.

i John iv

By love may He be gotten and holden, but by thought never.

The Cloud of Unknowing

Whosoever studies to reach contemplation (i.e. unitive know­ledge) should begin by searchingly enquiring of himself how much he loves. For love is the motive power of the mind (mackina mends), which draws it out of the world and raises it on high.

St. Gregory the Great

The astrolabe of the mysteries of God is love.

Jalal-uddin Rumi

Astrolabe

An astrolabe is an ancient astronomical instrument that was a handheld model of the universe. Its various functions also make it an elaborate inclinometer and an analogue calculation device capable of working out several kinds of problems in astronomy. Wikipedia

Heavens, deal so still!
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly.

Shakespeare

Love is infallible; it has no errors, for all errors are the want of love.

William Law

WE can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love. Love is a mode of knowledge, and when the love is sufficiently disinterested and sufficiently intense, the knowledge becomes unitive knowledge and so takes on the quality of infallibility. 

Where there is no disinterested love (or, more briefly, no charity), there is only [95 96] biased self-love, and consequently only a partial and distorted knowledge both of the self and of the world of things, lives, minds and spirit outside the self. 

The lust-dieted man 'slaves the ordinances of Heaven'—that is to say, he subordinates the laws of Nature and the spirit to his own cravings. 

The result is that 'he does not feel' and therefore makes himself incapable of knowledge. 

His ignorance is ultimately voluntary; if he cannot see, it is because 'he will not see.' Such voluntary ignorance inevitably has its negative reward. 

Nemesis follows hubris—sometimes in a spectacular way, as when the self-blinded man (Macbeth, Othello, Lear) falls into the trap which his own ambition or possessiveness or petulant vanity has pre­pared for him; sometimes in a less obvious way, as in the cases where power, prosperity and reputation endure to the end but at the cost of an ever-increasing imperviousness to grace and enlightenment, an ever completer inability to escape, now or hereafter, from the stifling prison of selfness and separateness. 

How profound can be the spiritual ignorance by which such 'enslavers of Heaven's ordinances' are punished is indicated by the behaviour of Cardinal Richelieu on his death-bed. The priest who attended him urged the great man to prepare his soul for its coming ordeal by forgiving all his enemies. 'I have never had any enemies,' the Cardinal replied with the calm sincerity of an ignorance which long years of intrigue and avarice and ambition had rendered as absolute as had been his political power, 'save only those of the State.' Like Napoleon, but in a different way, he was 'feeling heaven's power,' because he had refused to feel charity and therefore refused to know the whole truth about his own soul or anything else.

Cardinal Richelieu

Former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of France

Armand Jean du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu, known as Cardinal Richelieu, was a French clergyman and statesman. He was also known as l'Éminence rouge, or "the Red Eminence", a term derived from the title "Eminence" applied to cardinals, and the red robes they customarily wore

Here on earth the love of God is better than the knowledge of God, while it is better to know inferior things than to love them. By knowing them we raise them, in a way, to our intelligence, whereas by loving them we stoop towards them and may become subservient to them, as the miser to his gold.

St. Thomas Aquinas (paraphrased)

[ 97]

This remark seems, at first sight, to be incompatible with what precedes it. But in reality St. Thomas is merely distinguishing between the various forms of love and knowledge. It is better to love-know God than just to know about God, without love, through the reading of a treatise on theology. 

Gold, on the other hand, should never be known with the miser's love, or rather concupiscence, but either abstractly, as the scientific investigator knows it, or else with the disinterested love-know­ledge of the artist in metal, or of the spectator, who love-knows the goldsmith's work, not for its cash value, not for the sake of possessing it, but just because it is beautiful. 

And the same applies to all created things, lives and minds. 

It is bad to love-know them with self-centred attachment and cupidity; it is somewhat better to know them with scientific dispassion; it is best to supplement abstract knowledge-without-cupidity with true disinterested love-knowledge, having the quality of aes­thetic delight, or of charity, or of both combined.

We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but his image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship.

Pascal

By a kind of philological accident (which is probably no acci­dent at all, but one of the more subtle expressions of man's deep-seated will to ignorance and spiritual darkness), the word 'charity' has come, in modem English, to be synonymous with 'almsgiving,' and is almost never used in its original sense, as signifying the highest and most divine form of love. 

almsgiving 구호, 희사, 자선

Owing to this impoverishment of our, at the best of times, very in­adequate vocabulary of psychological and spiritual terms, the word 'love' has had to assume an added burden. 

'God is love,' we repeat glibly, and that we must 'love our neighbours as our­selves'; but 'love,' unfortunately, stands for everything 

from what happens when, on the screen, two close-ups rapturously collide 

to what happens when a John Woolman or a Peter Claver feels a concern about Negro slaves, 

because they are temples of the Holy Spirit

—from what happens when crowds shout and sing and wave flags in the Sport-Palast or the Red Square 

to what happens when a solitary contemplative becomes absorbed in the prayer of simple regard. 

Ambiguity in vocab­ulary leads to confusion of thought; 

and, in this matter of love, confusion of thought admirably serves the purpose of an un­regenerate and divided human nature that is determined to make the best of both worlds—to say that 

it is serving God, while in fact it is serving Mammon, Mars or Priapus.[98] 

--

Mammon /ˈmæmən/ in the New Testament of the Bible is commonly thought to mean money, material wealth, or any entity that promises wealth, and is associated ..

 Mars was the Roman god of war and second only to Jupiter in the Roman pantheon

In Greek mythology, Priapus is a minor rustic fertility god, protector of livestock, 

--

Systematically or in brief aphorism and parable, 

the masters of the spiritual life have described the nature of true charity 

have distinguished it from the other, lower forms of love. 

Let us consider its principal characteristics in order. 

First, charity is disinterested, seeking no reward, nor allowing itself to be diminished by any return of evil for its good. 

God is to be loved for Himself, not for his gifts, and persons and things are to be loved for God's sake, because they are temples of the Holy Ghost. 

Moreover, since charity is disinterested, it must of necessity be universal.

Love seeks no cause beyond itself and no fruit; it is its own fruit, its own enjoyment. I love because I love; I love in order that I may love.... Of all the motions and affections of the soul, love is the only one by means of which the creature, though not on equal terms, is able to treat with the Creator and to give back some­thing resembling what has been given to it. . . . When God loves, He only desires to be loved, knowing that love will render all those who love Him happy.

Sr. Bernard

For as love has no by-ends, wills nothing but its own increase, so everything is as oil to its flame; it must have that which it wills and carnxot be disappointed, because everything (including Un­kindness on the part of those loved) naturally helps it to live in its own way and to bring forth its own work.

William Law

[ 99]

Those who speak ill of me are really my good friends. [?]

When, being slandered, I cherish neither enmity nor preference, There grows within me the power of love and humility, which is born of the Unborn.

Kung-ckia Ta-shik

Some people want to see God with their eyes as they see a cow, and to love Him as they love their cow—for the milk and cheese and profit it brings them. This is how it is with people who love God for the sake of outward wealth or inward comfort. They do not rightly love God, when they love Him for their own advan­tage. Indeed, I tell you the truth, any object you have in your mind, however good, will be a barrier between you and the inmost Truth.

Eckhart

A beggar, Lord, I ask of Thee

More than a thousand kings could ask.

Each one wants something, which he asks of Thee.

I come to ask Thee to give me Thyself.

Ansari of Herat

I will have nothing to do with a love which would be for God or in God. This is a love which pure love cannot abide; for pure love is God Himself.

St. Catherine of Genoa

As a mother, even at the risk of her own life, protects her son, her only son, so let there be good will without measure between all beings. Let good will without measure prevail in the whole world, above, below, around, unstinted, unmixed with any feel­ing of differing or opposing interests. If a man remain steadfastly in this state of mind all the time he is awake, then is come to pass the saying, 'Even in this world holiness has been found.'

Metta Sutta

Learn to look with an equal eye upon all beings, seeing the one Self in all.

Sri,nad Bliagavatam

[100]        

The second distinguishing mark of charity is that, unlike the lower forms of love, it is not an emotion. It begins as an act of the will and is consummated as a purely spiritual awareness, a unitive love-knowledge of the essence of its object.

Let everyone understand that real love of God does not consist in tear-shedding, nor in that sweetness and tenderness for which usually we long, just because they console us, but in serving God in justice, fortitude of soul and humility.

St. Teresa

The worth of love does not consist in high feelings, but in detach­ment, in patience under all trials for the sake of God whom we love.

St. John of the Cross

By love I do not mean any natural tenderness, which is more or less in people according to their constitution; but I mean a larger principle of the soul, founded in reason and piety, which makes us tender, kind and gentle to all our fellow creatures as creatures of God, and for his sake.

William Law

The nature of charity, or the love-knowledge of God, is defined by Shankara, the great Vedantist saint and philosopher of the ninth century, in the thirty-second couplet of his Viveka-Cliudamani.

Among the instruments of emancipation the supreme is devotion. 

Contemplation of the true form of the real Self (the Atman which is identical with Brahman) is said to be devotion.

In other words, the highest form of the love of God is an im­mediate spiritual intuition, by which 'knower, known and knowledge are made one.' [ 101]

The means to, and earlier stages of, this supreme love-knowledge of Spirit by spirit are described by Shankara in the preceding verses of his philosophical poem, and consist in acts of a will directed 

• towards the denial of self-ness in thought, feeling and action, 
• towards desirelessness and non-attachment or (to use the corresponding Christian term) 'holy indifference,' 
• towards a cheerful acceptance of affliction, without self-pity and without thought of returning evil for evil, and finally 
• towards unsleeping and one-pointed mindful­ness of the Godhead who is at once transcendent and, because transcendent, immanent in every soul.

It is plain that no distinct object whatever that pleases the will can be God; and, for that reason, if the will is to be united with Him, it must empty itself, cast away every disorderly affection of the desire, every satisfaction it may distinctly have, high and low, temporal and spiritual, so that, purified and cleansed from all unrully satisfactions, joys and desires, it may be wholly occupied, with all its affections, in loving God.

For if the will can in any way comprehend God and be united with Him, it cannot be through any capacity of the desire, but only by love; and as all the delight, sweetness and joy, of which the will is sensible, is not love, it follows that ione of these pleasing impressions can be the adequate means of uniting the will to God. These adequate means consist in an act of the will.

And because an act of the will is quite distinct from feeling, it is by an act that the will is united with God and rests in Him; that act is love. This union is never wrought by feeling or exertion of the desire; for these remain in the soul as aims and ends. It is only as motives of love that feelings can be of service, if the will is bent on going onwards, and for nothing else....

He, then, is very unwise who, when sweetness and spiritual delight fail him, thinks for that reason that God has abandoned him; and when he finds them again, rejoices and is glad, thinking that he has in that way come to possess God.

More unwise still is he who goes about seeking for sweetness in God, rejoices in it, and dwells upon it; for in so doing he is not seeking after God with the will grounded in the emptiness of faith and charity, but only in spiritual sweetness and delight, which is a created thing, following herein in his own will and fond pleasure. . . . It is impossible for the will to attain to the sweetness and bliss of the divine union otherwise than- in detach­ment, in refusing to the desire every pleasure in the things of heaven and earth.

St. John of the Cross

Love (the sensible love of the emotions) does not unify.

True, it unites in act; but it does not unite in essence.

Eckhart

The reason why sensible love even of the highest object cannot unite the soul to its divine Ground in spiritual essence is that, like all other emotions of the heart, sensible love intensifies that selfness, which is the final obstacle in the way of such union. 'The damned are in eternal movement without any mixture of rest; 

we mortals, who are yet in this pilgrimage, have now movement, now rest.. . . Only God has repose without move­ment.' 

Consequently it is only if we abide in the peace of God that passes all understanding that we can abide in the knowledge and love of God. 

And to the peace that passes under­standing 

we have to go by way of the humble and very ordi­nary peace which can be understood by everybody

- peace between nations and within them (for wars and violent revo­lutions have the effect of more or less totally eclipsing God for the majority of those involved in them); 

- peace between individuals and within the individual soul (for personal quarrels and private fears, loves, hates, ambitions and distrac­tions are, in their petty way, no less fatal to the develop­ment of the spiritual life than are the greater calamities).

 We have to will the peace that it is within our power to get for ourselves and others, in order that we may be fit to receive that other peace, which is a fruit of the Spirit and the con­dition, as St. Paul implied, of the unitive knowledge-love of God.[ 103]

It is by means of tranquillity of mind that you are able to trans­mute this false mind of death and rebirth into the clear Intuitive Mind and, by so doing, to realize the primal and enlightening Essence of Mind. You should make this your starting point for spiritual practices. Having harmonized your starting point with your goal, you will be able by right practice to attain your true end of perfect Enlightenment.

If you wish to tranquilize your mind and restore its original purity, you must proceed as you would do if you were purifying a jar of muddy water. You first let it stand, until the sediment settles at the bottom, when the water will become clear, which corresponds with the state of the mind before it was troubled by defiling passions. Then you carefully strain off the pure water. When the mind becomes tranquillized and concentrated into perfect unity, then all things will be seen, not in their separate­ness, but in their unity, wherein there is no place for the passions to enter, and which is in full conformity with the mysterious and indescribable purity of Nirvana.

Surangama Sutra

This identity out of the One into the One and with the One is the source and fountainhead and breaking forth of glowing Love.

Eckhart

Spiritual progress, as we have had occasion to discover in several other contexts, is always spiral and reciprocal. 

Peace from dis­tractions and emotional agitations is the way to charity; and charity, or unitive love-knowledge, is the way to the higher peace of God. 

And the same is true of humility, which is the third characteristic mark of charity. Humility is a necessary condition of the highest form of love, and the highest form of love makes possible the consummation of humility in a total self-naughting.

Would you become a pilgrim on the road of Love?

The first condition is that you make yourself humble as dust and ashes.

Ansari of Herat

[104]

I have but one word to say to you concerning love for your neighbour, namely that nothing save humility can mould you to it; nothing but the consciousness of your own weakness can make you indulgent and pitiful to that of others. You will answer, I quite understand that humility should produce for­bearance towards others, but how am I first to acquire humility? Two things combined will bring that about; you must never separate them. The first is contemplation of the deep gulf; whence God's all-powerful hand has drawn you out, and over which He ever holds you, so to say, suspended. The second is the presence of that all-penetrating God. It is only in beholding and loving God that we can learn forgetfulness of self, measure duly the nothingness which has dazzled us, and accustom our­selves thankfully to decrease beneath that great Majesty which absorbs all things. Love God and you will be humble; love God and you will throw off the love of self; love God and you will love all that He gives you to love for love of Him.

Fénelon

Feelings, as we have seen, may be of service as motives of charity; 

but charity as charity has its beginning in the will

• —will to peace and humility in oneself, 
• will to patience and kind­ness towards one's fellow-creatures, 
• will to that disinterested love of God which 'asks nothing and refuses nothing.' 

But the will can be strengthened by exercise and confirmed by perseverance. 

This is very clearly brought out in the follow­ing record—delightful for its Boswellian vividness—of a con­versation between the young Bishop of Belley and his beloved friend and master, François de Sales.

I once asked the Bishop of Geneva what one must do to attain perfection. 'You must love God with all your heart,' he answered, 'and your neighbour as yourself.' [ 105]

'I did not ask wherein perfection lies,' I rejoined, 'but how to attain it.' 'Charity,' he said again, 'that is both the means and the end,

the only way by which we can reach that perfection 

which is, after all, but Charity itself. . . .

Just as the soul is the life of the body, so charity is the life of the soul.'

'I know all that,' I said. 'But I want to know how one is to love God with all one's heart and one's neighbour as oneself.'

But again he answered, 'We must love God with all our hearts, and our neighbour as ourselves.'

'I am no further than I was,' I replied. 'Tell me how to acquire such love.'

'The best way, the shortest and easiest way of loving God with all one's heart is to love Him wholly and heartily!'

He would give no other answer. At last, however, the Bishop said, 'There are many besides you who want me to tell them of methods and systems and secret ways of becoming perfect, and I can only tell them that the sole secret is a hearty love of God, and the only way of attaining that love is by loving.

 You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so you learn to love God and man by loving.

 All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves. If you want to love God, go on loving Him more and more. Begin as a mere apprentice, and the very power of love will lead you on to become a master in the art. Those who have made most progress will continually press on, never believ­ing themselves to have reached their end; for charity should go on increasing until we draw our last breath.'

Jean Pierre Camus

The passage 

from what St. Bernard calls the 'carnal love' of the sacred humanity to the spiritual love of the Godhead, 

from the emotional love that can only unite lover and beloved in act to the perfect charity which unifies them in spiritual substance, 

is reflected in religious practice as the passage from meditation, discursive and affective, to infused contemplation. 

All Chris­tian writers insist that the spiritual love of the Godhead is superior to the carnal love of the humanity, 

which serves as introduction and means to man's final end in unitive love-knowledge of the divine Ground; 

but all insist no less strongly that carnal love is a necessary introduction and an indispensable means. 

Oriental writers would agree that this is true for many persons, but not for all, since there are some born contem-platives who are able to 'harmonize their starting point with their goal' and to embark directly upon the Yoga of Know­ledge. It is from the point of view of the born contemplative that the greatest of Taoist philosophers writes in the following passage.[106] 

Those men who in a special way regard Heaven as Father and have, as it were, a personal love for it, how much more should they love what is above Heaven as Father! Other men in a special way regard their rulers as better than themselves and they, as it were, personally die for them. How much more should they die for what is truer than a ruler! When the springs dry up, the fish are all together on dry land. They then moisten each other with their dampness and keep each other wet with their slime. But this is not to be compared with forgetting each other in a river or lake.

Chuang Tsu

The slime of personal and emotional love is remotely similar to the water of the Godhead's spiritual being, but of inferior quality and (precisely because the love is emotional and there­fore personal) of insufficient quantity. Having, by their volun­tary ignorance, wrong-doing and wrong being, caused the divine springs to dry up, human beings can do something to mitigate the horrors of their situation by 'keeping one another wet with their slime.' But there can be no happiness or safety in time and no deliverance into eternity, until they give up thinking that slime is enough and, by abandoning themselves to what is in fact their element, call back the eternal waters. 

To those who seek first the Kingdom of God, all the rest will be added. From those who, like the modern idolaters of pro­gress, seek first all the rest in the expectation that (after the harnessing of atomic power and the next revolution but three) the Kingdom of God will be added, everything will be taken away. And yet we continue to trust in progress, to regard personal slime as the highest form of spiritual moisture and to prefer an agonizing and impossible existence on dry land to love, joy and peace in our native ocean.[ 107]

The sect of lovers is distinct from all others;

Lovers have a religion and a faith all their own.

Jolal-uddin Rumi

The soul lives by that which it loves rather than in the body which it animates. For it has not its life in the body, but rather gives it to the body and lives in that which it loves.

St. John of the Cross

Temperance is love surrendering itself wholly to Him who is its object; courage is love bearing all things gladly for the sake of Him who is its object; justice is love serving only Him who is its object, and therefore rightly ruling; prudence is love making wise distinctions between what hinders and what helps itself.

St. Augustine

The distinguishing marks of charity are disinterestedness, tranquillity and humility. But where there is disinterestedness there is neither greed for personal advantage nor fear for per­sonal loss or punishment; where there is tranquillity, there is neither craving nor aversion, but a steady will to conform to the divine Tao or Logos on every level of existence and a steady awareness of the divine Suchness and what should be one's own relations to it; and where there is humility there is no censoriousness and no glorification of the ego or any pro­jected alter-ego at the expense of others, who are recognized as having the same weaknesses and faults, but also the same cap­acity for transcending them in the unitive knowledge of God, as one has oneself. From all this it follows that charity is the root and substance of morality, and that where there is little charity there will be much avoidable evil. All this has been summed up in Augustine's formula: 'Love, and do what you like.'[108]  

Among the later elaborations of the Augustinian theme we may cite the following from the writings of John Everard, one of those spiritually minded seventeenth-century divines whose teachings fell on the deaf ears of warring factions and, when the revolution and the military dictatorship were at an end, on the even deafer ears of Restoration clergymen and their successors in the Augustan age. (Just how deaf those ears could be we may judge by what Swift wrote of his beloved and morally perfect Houyhnhnms. The subject matter of their conversations, as of their poetry, consisted of such things as 'friendship and benevolence, the visible operations of nature or ancient traditions; the bounds and limits of virtue, the unerring rules of reason.' Never once do the ideas of God, or charity, or deliverance engage their minds. Which shows sufficiently clearly what the Dean of St. Patrick's thought of the religion by which he made his money.)

Turn the man loose who has found the living Guide within him, and then let him neglect the outward if he can! Just as you would say to a man who loves his wife with all tenderness, "You are at liberty to beat her, hurt her or kill her, if you want to.'

Jo/in Everara'

From this it follows that, where there is charity, there can be no coercion.

God forces no one, for love cannot compel, and God's service, therefore, is a thing of perfect freedom.

Hans Den/i

But just because it cannot compel, charity has a kind of author­ity, a non-coercive power, by means of which it defends itself and gets its beneficent will done in the world—not always, of course, not inevitably or automatically (for individuals and, still more, organizations can be impenetrably armoured against divine influence), but in a surprisingly large number of cases.

Heaven arms with pity those whom it would not see destroyed.

Lao Tu

'He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me'—in those who harbour such thoughts hatred will never cease.

'He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me'—in those who do not harbour such thoughts hatred will cease.

For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time—this is an old rule.

D/zammapada

----

Our present economic, social and international arrangements are based, in large measure, upon organized lovelessness. 

We begin by lacking charity towards Nature, so that instead of trying to co-operate with Tao or the Logos on the inanimate and sub-human levels, we try to dominate and exploit, we waste the earth's mineral resources, ruin its soil, ravage its forests, pour filth into its rivers and poisonous fumes into its air. 

From lovelessness in relation to Nature we advance to lovelessness in relation to art—a lovelessness so extreme that we have effec­tively killed all the fundamental or useful arts and set up various kinds of mass-production by machines in their place. 

And of course this lovelessness in regard to art is at the same time a lovelessness in regard to the human beings who have to per­form the fool-proof and grace-proof tasks imposed by our mechanical art-surrogates and by the interminable paper work connected with mass-production and mass-distribution. 

With mass-production and mass-distribution go mass-financing, 

and the three have conspired to expropriate ever-increasing num­bers of small owners of land and productive equipment, 

thus reducing the sum of freedom among the majority and increas­ing the power of a minority to exercise a coercive control over the lives of their fellows. 

This coercively controlling minority is composed of private capitalists or governmental bureaucrats or of both classes of bosses acting in collaboration—and, of course, the coercive and therefore essentially loveless nature of the control remains the same, whether the bosses call them‑selves 'company directors' or 'civil servants.' [110] 

The only differ­ence between these two kinds of oligarchical rulers is 

that the first derive more of their power from wealth than from posi­tion within a conventionally respected hierarchy, 

while the second derive more power from position than from wealth. 

Upon this fairly uniform groundwork of loveless relationships are imposed 

others, which vary widely from one society to another, according to local conditions and local habits of thought and feeling. 

Here are a few examples: contempt and exploitation of coloured minorities living among white majori­ties, or of coloured majorities governed by minorities of white imperialists; hatred of Jews, Catholics, Freemasons or of any other minority whose language, habits, appearance or religion happens to differ from those of the local majority. 

And the crowning superstructure of uncharity is the organized loveless­ness of the relations between state and sovereign state—a love­lessness that expresses itself in the axiomatic assumption that 

it is right and natural for national organizations to behave like thieves and murderers, armed to the teeth and ready, at the first favourable opportunity, to be and kill. 

(Just how axiomatic is this assumption about the nature of nationhood is shown by the history of Central America. So long as the arbitrarily delimited territories of Central America were called provinces of the Spanish colonial empire, there was peace between their inhabitants. 

But early in the nineteenth century the various administrative districts of the Spanish empire broke from their allegiance to the 'mother country' and de­cided to become nations on the European model. 

Result: they immediately went to war with one another. 

Why? Because, by definition, a sovereign national state is an organ­ization that has the right and duty to coerce its members to steal and kill on the largest possible scale.)

'Lead us not into temptation' must be the guiding principle of all social organization, and the temptations to be guarded against and, so far as possible, eliminated by means of appro­priate economic and political arrangements are temptations against charity, that is to say, 

against the disinterested love of  God, Nature and man. [111]

First, the dissemination and general acceptance of any form of the Perennial Philosophy will do something to preserve men and women from the temptation to idolatrous worship of things in time

—church-worship, state-worship, revolutionary future-worship, humanistic self-worship, 

all of them essentially and necessarily opposed to charity. 

Next come decentralization, widespread private ownership of land and the means of production on a small scale, discouragement of monopoly by state or corporation, division of economic and political power (the only guarantee, as Lord Acton was never tired of insisting, of civil liberty under law).

 These social rearrangements would do much to prevent ambitious individuals, organizations and governments from being led into the temptation of behaving tyrannously; while co-operatives, democratically controlled professional organizations and town meetings would deliver the masses of the people from the temptation of making their decentralized individualism too rugged. 

But of course none of these intrinsi­cally desirable reforms can possibly be carried out, so long as it is thought right and natural that sovereign states should prepare to make war on one another. 

For modern war cannot be waged except by countries with an over-developed capital goods industry; countries in which economic power is wielded either by the state or by a few monopolistic corporations which it is easy to tax and, 

if necessary, temporarily to nationalize; countries where the labouring masses, being without property, are rootless, easily transferable from one place to another, highly regimented by factory discipline. 

Any decentralized society of free, uncoerced small owners, with a properly balanced economy must, in a war-making world such as ours, be at the mercy of one whose production is highly mechanized and centralized, whose people are without property and there­fore easily coercible, and whose economy is lop-sided. 

This is why the one desire of industrially undeveloped countries like Mexico and China is to become like Germany, or England, or the United States. So long as the organized lovelessness of war and preparation for war remains, there can be no mitigation, on any large, nation-wide or world-wide scale, of the organized lovelessness of our economic and political relation­ships.‑[iii]  

War and preparation for war are standing temptations to make the present bad, God-eclipsing arrangements of society progressively worse as technology becomes progressively more efficient.