In the life and death of Mahatma Gandhi we have seen reenacted in our time the supreme drama of humanity. Gandhi was a political leader and he was a seer, and perhaps never before on so grand a scale has anyone sought to shape the course of events in the world as it is by the example of a spirit which was not of the world as it is.
Gandhi was, as St. Paul said, transformed in the renewing of his mind, he was not 'conformed to this world.' Yet he sought to govern turbulent masses of men who were still very much conformed to this world, and have not been transformed. He died by violence as he was staking his life in order to set the example of non-violence.
Thus he posed again the perennial question of how the insight of the seers and saints is related to the work of legislators, rulers, and statesmen. That they are in conflict is only too plain, and yet it is impossible to admit, as Gandhi refused to admit, that the conflict can never be resolved. For it is necessary to govern mankind and it is necessary to transform men.
Perhaps we may say that the insight of the governors of men is, as it were, horizontal: They act in the present, with men as they are, with the knowledge they possess, with what they can now understand, with the mixture of their passions and desires and instincts. They must work with concrete and with the plainly and generally intelligible things.
The insight of the seers, on the contrary, is vertical. They deal, however wide their appeal, with each person potentially, as he might be transformed, renewed, and regenerated. And because they appeal to experience which men have not yet had, with things that are not at hand and are out of their immediate reach, with the invisible and the unattained, they speak and act, as Gandhi did, obscurely, appealing to the imagination by symbolic evocation and subtle example.
The ideals of human life which the seers teach--non-resistance, humility, and poverty and chastity--have never been and can never be the laws of a secular society. Chastity, consistently and habitually observed, would annihilate it. Poverty, if universally pursued, would plunge it into misery and disease. Humility and non-resistance, if they were the rule, would mean the triumph of predatory force.
Is it possible that the greatest seers and teachers did not know this, and that what they enjoined upon men was a kind of suicide and self-annihilation? Obviously not. Their wisdom was not naive, and it can be understood if we approach it not as rules of conduct but as an insight into the economy and the order and the quality of the passions.
At the summit of their wisdom what they teach is, I think, not how in the practical issues of daily life men in society can and should~ behave but to what ultimate values they should give their allegiance. Thus the injunction to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's is not a definite political principle which can be applied to define the relation of Church and State. It is an injunction as to where men shall have their ultimate obligations, that in rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, they should not give to Caesar their ultimate loyalty, but should reserve it.
In the same manner, to have humility is to have, in the last reaches of fonviction, a saving doubt. To embrace poverty is to be w~thout possessiveness and a total attachment to things and to honors. To be non-resistant is to be at last non-competitive.
What the seer points toward is best described in the language of St. Paul as the creation of the new man. 'And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.' What is this new man? He is the man who has been renewed and is 'no longer under a schoolmaster,' whose passions have been altered, as Gandhi sought to alter the passions of his countrymen, so that they need no discipline from without because they have been transformed from within. Such regenerated men can, as Confucius said, follow what their hearts desire without transgressing what is right. They are 'led of the spirit' in the Pauline language, and therefore they 'are not under the law.'
It is not for such men as them that governments are instituted and laws enacted and enforced. These are for the old Adam. It is for the aggressive, possessive, carnal appetites of the old Adam that there are punishments and rewards, and for his violence a superior force.
It is only for the regenerate man, whose passions have been transformed, that the discipline of the law and of power are no longer needed, nor any incentive or reward beyond the exquisite and exhilarating wholesomeness and unity and freedom of his own passions.
