Integrity – In the Land of Nod?
By Carlyle Marney
Once upon a time, long ago and far away, I prevailed on Carlyle Marney, who was afraid to fly, to drive to a meeting I was responsible for and speak. He did it out of friendship. But he took the assignment seriously. This sermon on "Integrity – In the Land of Nod?" is vintage Carlyle Marney who though "being dead yet speaketh." Hear ye him. (Even though reading this may make you wish for Blaise Pascal.) … Foy Valentine
Where would integrity be important to our survival if not in Nod-the land of wandering? Wanderers we are-for something of everything we used for boundaries, or treasured as landmarks, or revered as sacred signs, has gone away. Who needs Integrity more than Nod-dwellers? Or where is less of such a commodity to be found? Where more than in this "terrible twentieth century," this Sargasso sea, this "never-ending winter" of our discontent, has the assay on the ore of integrity run lighter? And our refuge, the Church?
"Your Church," says my brother, "is not just a wagon turned over, it is a wagon that has struck a land-mine-and-it was carrying some of everything precious we had hoped to gain."
"What kind of God is it that will put it on a man all his life?" writes my pastor-neighbor, and continues, "To tell the truth, God is the greatest disappointment that has ever come into my life." Who is this fellow? A disgruntled and angered little mountain preacher? No this is Jonah, Job, and Jeremiah mid-passage. And, he grasps not just an oar,
Noah`s Ark needs no rudder when it has no bottom!
It`s the bottom that we seem to have lost and I dread this assignment on Integrity.
Indeed, the incidence of unexpected cop-outs is appalling. In the clinics and shops we run at Interpreters` House, the people bailing out of bottomless arks reflect a culture-wide loss of base. They cop out on marriage, for money, and without meaning. It`s all as senseless as Watergate, for as one put it this month, "There`s no immorality in Washington because there`s no morality-just a-morality." No bottom.
Halfway through his Listening to America, in Denver, Bill Moyers is joined by his old Peace Corps colleague, Blair Butterworth. Blair is speaking,
"…I`ve traveled over ten thousand miles so far this year and listened to a lot of people. Most of them have one thing in common. Black and white, North and South, they feel they`re diluted. They feel like flotsam floating down some polluted river and disappearing in the ocean with nobody giving a damn."
I find myself very angry about this. In fact, I`m even angry about my lack of integrity in agreeing to do this paper, for I emptied a promise, canceled a commitment, and violated integrity to do it. And while it was in preparation, at a seminar with a dozen front-line varsity pastors, in my own study at home, one of those front-line varsity pastors actually stole my very favorite pipe without which I can scarcely write a line! And while going from one university to another on a Martin Luther King, Jr. anniversary, I heard on a big radio-station another front-line varsity fellow preach the same sermon I had used that morning. Word for word, he preached "Weep Not for Me," from a little book of mine. And-time would fail me to tell of my light-bill, up 140%, my dentist`s retirement to which I`ve made a substantial contribution, my congressman who never represents me, and the kind of lying promises one hears on religious radio.
Indeed, I`m angry about my lack of Integrity with Foy Valentine. For after that third call when I gave in, he wrote a long letter telling me what he wanted me to say, which I promptly misplaced. And so, angry to be sans integrity, I now address my topic, "In the Land of Nod-Integrity."
II.
I shall not lift from this callow symptomatology a diagnosis yet. But where did it go-the Integrity we thought we knew as a given? What happened to that selfhood which both implies and rests on some power of self-actualization? Well, it was not just usurped by cultural diabolism, or the powers that perpetrate mass-hypnotism. Some of our selfhood we have given away; some we have traded away; some we have frittered away; but with respect to most of what is missing-courage, joy, and continuity, we simply never put in our claim. That is to say, we have, by and large, still to achieve a worthy "I." For no "I" by definition, means that integrity is an impossibility.
The recovery, or discovery of that "I" rests, in turn, on the coming into a wide power to intend-to be possessed by an intention, something I do in fact intend in the service of a worthy end. And what would make an end worthy? Whether or not its faithful service contributes to the making of Persons where non-persons have clustered. This may be our only business-but it all begins in the being possessed by a great expectation.
III.
That this expectation is first of all the expectation of a worthy end is not circular talk; it is fundamental to the drama, the journey-or as Julian Hartt once put it, "No one lifts his little finger to work (be-become) without hope." It`s fundamental for all Nod-dwellers, wanderers, viatores on a journey, the end of which we anticipate but do not know. This is particularly true in drama, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge shows in a lecture on Shakespeare`s plays. His first point is the integrity with which Shakespeare`s work always relies on Expectation rather than Surprise. Surprise, he says, is less-as when one sees a shooting star-than when one long expects, then experiences, sun-rise. He illustrates the superiority of this basic expectation in dramatic integrity (over surprise) with "the true reading of the passage": "…God said, Let there be light and there was light," not there was light.
I was reading at this very point on Sunday, January 20, as Cecil Sherman began to recite Genesis 1:1ff (King James Version) for the morning lesson over a powerful six state radio-TV station. You are right-just as Coleridge was saying "there was light" Sherman read it "there was light." Then he (Dr. Sherman) started a biographical sketch of Charles Darwin! I thought, "My Lord! He`s brought the wrong notes!" No matter, the sermon on "Evolution, the Bible, and the Meaning of Religion" was simply peer-vintage integrity. My expectation had been met like a drama. My surprise was only at a coincidence of hearing. I would have expected of his sermon to display integrity serving a worthy end.
IV.
Which allows me, before I speak of that expectation we have largely lost, before I turn to the characteristica universalis, the verites eternelles, the primae veritates we have learned largely to exist without, to speak of Integrity, ding in sich, the thing-in-itself. What would it be; if indeed we could get or have it?
And here, once again indeed, `tis not a getting or having, for Integrity represents a being-one-is. It is the quality of being Whole, "weller-than-well" (Menninger), the undivided man, the collected and gathered man.
"Then," says Augustine, "I collected myself from that dispersion to which I had given myself and committed myself to the One."
Could I speak better of Integrity in terms of what it is not? Is Integrity a task to be achieved? Integrity, never self-ordained, hardly ever self-recognized, is always perceived, if at all, over the shoulder, after the event, otherwise it`s like walking on water-look down and you sink. Integrity may be addressed with other significant words-telos (end) but not teleios (perfect), identity, ego-identity (Erikson, et al) oneness, vraidoom; integrity is the quality of consistency with one`s end. It may very well be recognizable only post-maturity in men or movements or states of being, though here allowance must always be made for Messiahs who are almost always young and for that kind of genius in art, science, and craft which may be dominant early in life. Also, as has been commonly seen, Integrity may very well be destroyed or diminished post-maturity, i.e. senility may "get it" and it surely will never bestow it!
Again, could or should I speak better of Integrity with a negative description? Is it a via negativa (but not negans) that speaks in terms of what Integrity is not? I could affirm, then, Integrity by elimination (i.e., something I have not); or, by disclaimer (a force I cannot use); or, by denial, (a power I do not want). But to do this would mean I should have to take more seriously those powers of elimination, disclaimer, and denial which come from my shadow-side. No contemporary discussion of Integrity could rest on a set of rational expectations without running into shipwreck, contradiction, even chaos. For life is not this rational or positive. Nor is life, I think, just mad. It`s a myth-and so is Integrity. Any appreciation, appearance, apparition or apprehension of Integrity must take into account what C.G. Jung characteristically called the "shadow side."
The "shadow side" of me, of us, is all that is not visible, and is back-side, too, of any supposed Integrity, for given the power of my own unconscious (the ego is mastered from behind it-Freud) it`s a safe bet that any supposed Integrity we may claim is faithful to the hidden Childhood Vow, the mixture of motives, the self-serving and preserving wishes, dreams, intentions never emerging in the daylight of rational consciousness but always energetically there. This means at least, that no Integrity I could claim can stand alone in the light of day.
This shadow-side to Integrity creates a real problem in definition. Integrity as a word (as a fad-word at that) maybe cannot help us. It has no deep roots. It must have an object. Like the word "race," it is a seventeenth-century word, too, and it`s mostly too mathematical to be human. It rises out of a unity we have not got, never had, and maybe so cannot get, from here. It may be a word, as Bergen Evans says of "integration," that ought to be dropped for now, except in Mathematics, and anyone who had Algebra as often and as many times as I did knows Mathematics cannot help us.
That is to say, Integrity cannot stand without an object, an intention, and here we come into another country, and a better. The story of my life is best told as the history and present state of an intention with respect to an object I serve, really serve, and here we are all indictable-we reach and have reached, for what we really want. Mere Integrity is no problem-we have served what we have wanted-public and private. There is no fundamental reason to distinguish between a so-called public and private integrity. In any case we serve our "wanter" with integrity. Hence, I claim that the very distinction of "private" and "public" is a denial of Integrity.
Would I indict us all? Yes, we reach for what we really want with a "wanter" that needs fixing. Which is to say, I may need a better God than I have served before I dare speak longer of my Integrity. Integrity, I have to ask, with respect to what and for benefit of whom?
And yet, as ideal, it is there, often described and served by very un-ideal observers, I frankly was hunting another line when I stumbled on Coleridge`s evaluation of Shakespeare. And who is this who calls to our attention the integrity of the work of a playwright 200 years dead even then? Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a man fighting his way past his own opium addiction to a "loquacious maturity" in such a state of "creative exhaustion" that he finished scarcely any project he started, and had always, said Charles Lamb -"the look of an arch-angel a little damaged." Carlyle said that he never really straightened out his knees! And yet, he, Coleridge, more than any other, and first of modern critics, is responsible for the discovery of the integrity of work that changed Shakespeare`s reputation.
My point? Not even Shakespeare knew his own integrity; it had to be discovered for us 200 years later by a man himself possessed of gifts far beyond his use of them. And so,
Shakespeare has no innocent adulteries, no interesting incests, no virtuous vice: he never renders that amiable which religion and reason alike teach us to detest, or clothe impurity in the garb of virtue….
(In an age when the letters of women of high rank were often coarser than his writings, "he never injures the mind," he never "manipulates.")
In Shakespeare vice never walks as in twilight…(he) does not make every magistrate a drunkard or glutton, nor every poor man meek, inhumane, and temperate; he has no benevolent butchers nor any sentimental rat-catchers.
Erik Erikson makes almost alone the legitimate emphasis upon Integrity as a concept in its metaphysical, psychological, and ethical dimensions. True, his use of the term is always "private," that is with respect to the maturing of an ego-identity in an individual-not a state or culture, but in various versions, and in several places (Young Man Luther, Gandhi`s Truth, Childhood and Society, Identity) Erikson presents Ego-Integrity as that maturity which is the opposite of Despair.
He begins with the curt, if not truculent answer the aged Freud gave in response to the question, "What should a grown man be able to do well?" Leiben und arbeiten, said Freud, make love (genital) and work! Erikson`s expansion of that answer makes beautiful sense.
When a person has enjoyed the cycles of work, play, sex, procreation with a loved partner of the opposite sex with whom he has seen evidence of the worth of his work and the adoption of some of his ideals by his own and can, therefore, accept the onceness and onliness and rightness of his own life cycle, and the fear of death goes away, he has achieved ego-identity, Integrity, the climax of the life-term, prelude to a meaningful old age. In the words of Calderon, he possesses his own soul. Es patrimonio del alma, the antipode of despair.
Unamuno speaks vividly of that despair which is counter to Integrity with an old Basque description of despair-disgust: gozarse una le carne del alma-he eats the flesh of his own soul!
In Erikson`s terms put negatively-this despair reigns where one has not "taken care of things and people," has not "adapted himself to the triumphs and disappointments of being the originator of others and the generator of things and ideas." Despair lacks "the ego`s accrued assurance" for order and meaning. It is neither faithful to "image bearers" of the past or ready both to take and renounce present leadership. It has no peace with its one and only life cycle, no "new love" for one`s parents, still wishes "they" had been different, and still refuses to be responsible for one`s own life. Despair has no "sense of comradeship" with people of distant times or pursuits; knows nothing of a human dignity and love one can give; and has no strength for defending one`s "own lifestyle" against all threats. In sum, he eats his soul, he never possesses it.
But enough, lest I misuse both Erikson and you. I must turn now to another dimension. What is the effect, and meaning, and is there any possible recourse for us who see this Despair, prime evidence of an absent or dead Integrity, as dominant mood over the wide, wide sea of a whole culture?
V.
I would now read you Foy Valentine`s commission if I had not (deliberately?) lost it. In effect, and from some kind of self-confirmed posture of ex cathedra authority, as if you were an audience that really matters (instead of just 3/1000 of 1 percent of the population) he really laid it on me to go National. I`ve done that, thirty years of it, but my friend, in effect, still asks me in my peroration to do what Mr. Keble did on July 14, 1833, when, before the judges of the superior courts, in University pulpit at Oxford, he preached his sermon, "National Apostasy."
John Henry Newman tells of it in Apologia Pro Vita Sua: twelve years before he would refugee his way into the Roman Community, Newman had become ill in Italy-for weeks-but knew he would not die because he had "not sinned against Light." Becalmed a fever-ridden week in the Straits of Bonafacio, bound from Palermo to Marseilles, he had written "Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom…" and had staggered home "without stopping" from Marseilles to his Mother`s house, just in time to hear on Sunday what he thereafter always called "the start of the Oxford movement," the sermon by Mr. Keble, "National Apostasy."
But this is not 1833; I am not John Kebel, this is not Oxford, it may be too late to "save" any culture we cherish really much less re-form one we largely never had, and beside, there are no Superior Court Judges here, and our situation is that of a vaster, more permeative Chaos than ever England knew.
And yet, the topic could be the same: Apostasy, but apostasy from what? Apostasy from a great Integrity! Apostasy by whom? Not just a denomination, or nation, or single culture, but apostasy by a species that chokes on its own tongues while apostatizing itself from its destiny as a species by denying its own high end. Apostasy from a great Integrity, but with respect to what and who? There are so many lesser gods around. Perhaps, even, it`s not integrity we lack; most of us have served faithfully what we have truly treasured. Perchance we need instead a better God!
How shall one speak of this? And our human situation, with hope? I shall finish it with that title: Integrity-in the Land of Nod?
I start at our beginnings-as soon as Adam and Eve ran past the myth-system that identified them they ran past the boundaries of the garden that sustained them. The next place-name to Eden is the land of Nod-wandering, no borders, and so no center, no hope place. but the blow always falls on Cain, the next generation. Adam and Eve did not violate God; He is inviolable by definition. They did not empty God`s command; His word is indestructible. Rather, they ran past the boundaries of their perception of their identify (their myth-system) and this puts any of us in a situation of Nod-being, Nod-living; it`s a wandering that is Despair, Integrity`s opposite.
Once a culture runs past the boundaries of its identifying myth-system, it is expelled from its garden and lives with its sons and daughters as Wanderers on the Earth. This Gotterdammerung, as Wagner knows, is never translated with "Twilight" for it is more, and deeper, and much darker. It threatens instead to be the long drawn-out end of something.
Once a species runs past that common Memory on which its Expectation relies, its Integrity is exploded, fragmented, atomized-Babylon is Babel, Wanderers wander, split-tongued, unable to hear or be heard; identity disappears; the dead stack up in faceless mass. In terms precious to at least five cultures this is where we are: we have run past our paidaeia which aimed at arete; we have undermined our own bildung; we are emptying our 18th Century Dream; we have senilitized our New World prematurely; we have forgotten that Kingdom of God, that Common Good that collected us from Babel and Nod under the rubric of Ahad, the One. And where we now live-Nod! Except the "we" implicit in wanderers who have a destination is going away and we are each of us:
Alone, alone, all, all, alone
Alone on a wide, wide sea!
Indeed, we are Ancient Mariners all-the despair of a non-integrity largely reigns, for we have given up our great Myth-and this is Eden`s point. Nod. This is our human situation-our existinz. Indeed, has not our species given up some part of everything we had,…except Possibility?
Possibility? I speak now of an Integrity within our reach, but an Integrity not separable from a proper what, a relational Who.
More than twenty-five centuries ago, says Aldous Huxley, it began to be committed to writing, it was already aged by millennia of tentative groping among all peoples and every higher faith-system.
(You expected me to turn toward Jesus and religion didn`t you? You think any religieux-is so naive that he does not take seriously that damning line of Lucretius (De Rerum Naturae, 1, 101) "tanturn religio potuit suadere malorum"-"so much of religion is able to put forward the bad!"
Let me escape any charge of mere pietism by calling forth the single most lacking factor in all public religion-we have almost no "nerve" for the critical stance Integrity-with-a-valid-Who would level against religion-in-general. As Temple has long put it:
…it is by no means true that any religion is better than none. A strong case could be made for the contention that on the whole Religion, up to date, had done more harm than good.
Religion itself, when developed to real maturity, knows quite well that the first object of its condemnation is bad religion, which is a totally different thing from irreligion, and can be a very much worse thing (Nature, Man, and God, p. 22).
Here, in a myth system we have run past, competent faith-men have forsworn Integrity by their failure to damn civic religion, folk religion, public religion, and all other religion, especially media religion when it is so Bad. The Faith that knows better and says nothing critical with vague platitudes has foregone any possibility of being heard as representing Integrity.)
Possibility? Integrity with respect to a what and a who permeative of all higher culture? Yes, I say, and use Huxley`s phrase for it-it is a Highest Common Factor.
It is this Highest Common Factor we have run past and that puts us in the land of Nod-with-busyness, and makes a Babel. Little wonder or blame, for
…the nature of this one Reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfill certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit.
Hence, he adds,
it is hardly surprising that a theology based upon the experience of nice, ordinary, unregenerate people should carry so little conviction.
And so, a voice like mine can scarce-hearing expect in and through the "reverential insensibility" of the "faithful," the "stupor of the Spirit" among the "regular," and the "inward deafness" of the "professional" and the "ordained." But there is a larger witness than ours.
I call for a Third World wagon-Master to turn our Species-Trek toward a banner perhaps only denizens of that Third-World can help us find and salute again and in loyalty to which Integrity could come home.
For:
As Leibniz caught from sources we would call Third-World and extra-Christian, there exist primae possibilitates in which the possibility of all that is derivative has its ground (Windelband, p. 398). There are verites eternelles, primae veritates, a set of characteristica universalis, known in some version to all higher religions and in primitive awareness to all clusters of our species with respect to which we could recover-discover a great Expectation and without which there is no core for any Integrity that could unite us and make us men. It is ancient, "immemorial and universal." It is a philosophia perennis, and our loss of it is our land of Nod.
Philosophia Perennis, it is Leibniz`s phrase, though I took it that dark, winter day in 1966 as my own from the first book I turned toward after-in fact, I scribbled in the back–
I look out my great window up to Wolf Pen Gap, bare bones of the last of Blue Ridge highlighted by snow-and why, of all people, when I am ready to think again, after the blows to heart and lung, do I start with Aldous Huxley`s introduction to Perennial Philosophy?
Because, I guess, it is perennial and well-nigh universal. `Twas a good place to start my journey back. Dear Archbishop Temple picks up this theme in his great Gifford Lectures. "Three central convictions" he calls them; a tripod from which all higher religions hang-
Spirit is a true source of initiation of processes-a real arche, a vera causa;
All existence finds its source in a Supreme Reality of which the Nature is Spirit;
Between that Spirit and ourselves there can be, and to some extent already true fellowship…
Gorgeous banner for Integrity lived out in behalf of a species-wide wandering-toward-home. And, I do not turn away from that "Commonwealth of Value" that Kingdom of God the great primate of England`s Church served when I turn even more involvedly and dependently to Huxley`s version.
The Perennial Philosophy, a gathering of minds and words for those who would make themselves "loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit" makes room for my highest notion that Integrity must rest on a metaphysic, a psychology, and derivative from both, a viable ethic.
Philosophia Perennis, Huxley calls it a thing:
Metaphysic:
recognizes a divine Reality substantial
to the world of things and lives and minds;
Psychology:
that finds in the Soul something similar
to, or even identical with, divine Reality;
Ethic:
that places man`s final end in the
knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being
the "thing" is "immemorial and universal."
(Aldoux Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, Harper & Bros., 1944-45, pp. VII-XI.)
For days, it seems, I have talked around Integrity. In our land of Nod I now know, with Jules Henry, that "man wrings from culture what…he obtains from it"; that we mortals in Nod cannot wait "like giant turtles" for that "organic mutation" 200 millions years could bring; and I know that we hunt "in anguish and perplexity" for a way of living well with our species. I know, too, that any Integrity I may come upon is dependent upon a great common expectation-not-yet-apprehended; that here and there one has gone before us in the great Intention to show us how.
Chiefest of them all, I have been seized by the intention of Jesus. This is his integrity-that he in fact intended to know and to do the will of the Father-and so Integrity is more than Expectation taken from a worthy Source, it is also the intention of service to a worthy End. And I know, too, where it must be, for me, lived.
I have not, and I do not now claim Integrity for myself, but I have, so far, served faithfully an intention. I have intended to be a part of the pilgrim people of God. I did, and I do, across my years since 23, claim to have served a set of vows:
I would never give to any adjective the rank of noun-
I would follow any new light as soon as I knew it to be light
I would respect and credit my sources, my teachers, my compadres as a journey, wherever-
Two modest concerns remain: My Integrity, as a prospective arrival at Identity worth keeping, must be lived where I am and on a journey.
Where I am? I am essentially a Southerner, south of God. Flannery O`Connor, gifted to genius, Catholic, southern writer, dead of dread Lupus in her prime, is my model of integrity "where I am." In a taped lecture for female seminarians, midwest of God, she claims that our regional images are impressed at our first distinction of the difference in sounds. They are part idiom, part sound, part history and constitute a force so strong as to be of necessity "engaged," but which pressures of region one must ride to any universal. This journey, this ride of Valkyries, is a story of mythic dimensions made up of the myths which the poor (of all regions) hold in common. In our own place she speaks of "underground religious affinities" and allows for a regional reality that where we live will emerge as "grotesque"-yet each of us bears "some heavy responsibility" whose nature "we have forgotten."
I have tried on this journey to recover the responsible center of our species-wide expectation from within my own "grotesque," knowing that to see the freak in oneself implies some conception of what it would mean to be whole-and I no longer expect my salvation from any regional recognition of where I am in Church-for as O`Connor puts it on her own Roman Church, "the Church`s luggage has been set down in a puddle by its domestic servants." I am forced to look beyond man`s perverse reaction to memory, gifts, and graces-but I know for us all, that with Kierkegaard and Flannery O`Connor grace means possibility, although it may not always mean healing. Some of the meaning is in the Integrity that accepts the limits imposed by illness, disease, weakness, and the suffering of the innocent. Ant here, even the Integrity of God is at stake, if it makes, if this suffering makes, any sense at all.
Meanwhile, from that earlier Exodus, I take two verbs-so much better than adjectives or nouns-nasa they journeyed; chanah they pitched. They traveled, they camped-and Identity went, and goes, before them-where they were-on a journey.
