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Chapter 2.

The Continuing Search: From St. Francis to Nietzsche.

The foregoing chapter was little more than a bare outline of my life experience up until 1932, when, at the age of 40, I moved to my farm in the mountains. But if my reader is to have any conception of what those years meant to me, of their spiritual content, and of what they were as preparation for all the years that still stood ahead, in which I was to lay myself wide open to all the light that history and science might throw upon our problems, I think it necessary, for one thing, to make it clear why I gave up my Franciscan venture, and the full extent of what was involved in my giving it up.

It was near the end of August, 1929, that I left our shanty in Wallington, the foreign quarter on the edge of Passaic, never to return. Here, since the fall of 1923, our little group had undertaken to walk in the footsteps of Jesus. Nothing had we called our own. Whatever we had on our backs or held in our hands, we had stood ready to give to anyone who had need or desire for it. Here we had made a gift of our labor, and done both highly skilled and very menial labor for the working people about us, White and Black, native and foreign. Here I had spoken on the streets. Here we had intervened in behalf of the striking textile workers and been arrested for it. Here, out of my knowledge of the plight in which the World War had left the peoples of Central Europe and in obedience to the Voice within me, as a seal of my devotion, I had taken off my shoes at Christmas time in 1923 and for two years thereafter had gone barefoot. And now it was all over. At the time, I think that I did not fully realize it had come to an end. To be sure, I do seem to have had some sense that something fearful was happening to me. Intuitively I felt myself on the edge of an abyss, and foreknew that I must go down into it. I must go down into chaos. But it was only years later that I came to any clear understanding of why I had had to give up my Franciscan venture. But one thing seems clear. I came to the end of it because I could not go on. I was beaten.

What had beaten me, do you ask? Why was I at the end of my rope?

In all honesty, I should say that the most important cause, from the beginning to the very end of my Franciscan venture, was my love for Genevieve,¹ who in 1922 had become my wife. This story I already have told in my autobiography (not yet published), without sparing myself and, I believe, lovingly and not unfavorably to Genevieve. Here, however, I will say only what is essential to the point in question. My love for her rivaled and divided what I then conceived to be my love for my God and for the universal family of men. And my love for her called for and seemed to require a kind of life that I never was able to reconcile with my life as a follower of Jesus and St. Francis, to which I felt deeply and inescapably called. For ten years—and even longer—I was so divided by it that the singleness of my devotion to my God was constantly menaced and shaken. The struggle over it certainly drained out of me an enormous amount of energy that otherwise might have gone into my work.

But this was not the only thing by which, toward the end, I became divided. Many kinds of doubts had been sapping the foundations of my certainty. For instance, my reading of rationalistic psychology had caused me to look behind the scenes of my mystical experience and to question its validity and the reliability of the inner direction I derived from it. But also my Franciscan life was challenged by a deepening spiritual insight and by the mounting pressure of some new thing within me. In our life in Wallington we had, as it were, been laying ourselves down in the gutter because others had to lie there. But now I came to the conclusion that this was not necessarily the best way to help a man, or even the truest way to show him love. Then, too, I doubted whether a Franciscan life was a true expression of my own make-up. I began to feel that to too large an extent I had been under Jesus’ spell. Without fully realizing it or what the effects of it must be, I had been animated by a desire to make my life a literal fulfillment of Jesus’ teaching, and this even long after my head at least knew perfectly well that it was spiritual suicide to copy any other man. But toward the end of the Wallington days I began to suspect what I had been doing. I had been straining to wear a coat that did not fit me, that had not been made for me, that did not come out of me as my own skin came out of me. I had been in love with an ideal, with a picture in my mind of the way Jesus had lived. The love was real enough and alone had sustained me, but the picture, the way of life, what I tried to become, was taken over from another, from outside me, by my head. It did not come out of my own organic necessity, as it were out of my own viscera, my own loins, as a child comes out of its mother. But no man can live thus. He can only push himself—with his will. My effort was bound to fail.

Moreover, this effort to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, had, of course, actually been a hindrance to my realizing and fulfilling my own life. But now I was beginning to feel the slowly growing demands of a new life within me, that would fain give itself its own law. A part of this new life was the reassertion of the claims of the mind, which as a Franciscan I had tended to disparage and to dismiss. Now would I think. Now would I know. Now would I read more psychology, and history, and science. Now would I question—anything, and look into, and under, and behind, everything that aroused my doubt, or my curiosity, or my interest. Implicit in the growing life within me, too, was doubtless the aristocratic instinct and taste, which I suppose have always been native to me. Even when I had struggled hardest to make myself equal with the lowest and least, at the bottom of my quest had been my desire to find those who had “eyes to see and ears to hear,” spiritually superior persons, those who regardless of their clothes or their bank accounts were (or had it in them to become) Earth’s noblemen and kings. My willingness any longer to hold myself stripped for others’ sake, to call nothing my own, to give anything I had to anyone who might want it, was now undermined by my clearing perception that men are by no means equal, that many of them were not even my equal. And certainly if I were looking for those who had eyes to see and ears to hear, people of deep spiritual perception, great courage, love, strength of will, and supreme devotion, I was in the wrong place and living the wrong kind of life. Despite their friendliness, precious few of the people about us had any interest in our presence among them deeper than the opportunity we afforded to get good work done for little or nothing. The squalor and brutishness of the life about us seemed to be almost symbolized by the stinking city dump on the edge of which our little cabin was built. I fairly held my breath each time I came back to Wallington. I was coming to hate it and all that it stood for. I longed for a period of quiet, until I should be able to see clearly what all the unrest within me meant, and in what direction I should go. But for the time there was no clear or steady vision left in me. And I was utterly exhausted.

And so, at last, I left Wallington. And I left it, I say again, simply because I could not go on any longer. I was beaten.

In the days of his youth every man, if he has any vision and venture in him, is likely to write, as did Blake, his “Songs of Innocence.” And in my Franciscan venture I had written mine, not in words but in life, in act. But now experience had bitten into me deeply. My youthful enthusiasms had broken up on the unyielding realities of human nature and of human existence. Now, as I have said, I felt a necessity to get down to facts, and to evaluate them. Now also I must face a larger world, the life of man as a society and not just as a collection of individuals. I must see him against his background, know his past as well as his present. And not least, I must be more realistic. I must have the courage to face men not only for what they may become but also for what they are now.

Yet I foreknew that people would turn away from me if I gave up my Franciscan way of life, especially the Church people. And, to their minds, to turn away from their ideals might well have seemed a descent to lower ideals or an abandonment of all ideals. That their Christianity might be a sickness, and that my sloughing it off might be a precursor to convalescence and a sign of hope and new life, that of course rarely occurred to them.

And indeed their expectations might easily have proved correct. For the first result of my giving up my Franciscan venture of nine long years was no new bloom or sign of promise. It was chaos. I had staked everything I had on my still small voice, and it had come to nothing. It seemed as though my very God had led me astray, had led me up a blind alley and left me. Only after years was I to realize that men did not know, never had known, could not know, anything about any metaphysical Lord of the universe, who was omniscient, omnipotent, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable. That which had spoken within me, which I had called God and to which I had entrusted my whole life, was nothing absolute or infallible. There might be no higher source of self-direction to which any man could turn, yet was it ineluctably conditioned by a man’s heredity and by all his experience since the day he was born. It represented, therefore, only the best light that was capable of reaching him at any particular stage of his development. As such it was to be followed as if it were indeed the voice of God, and if sometimes it led a man into a course that later proved unsound (as must happen now and then), there was no ground for feeling disillusioned or for distrusting it as a source of direction for the future. The error into which it had led him must be recognized for the error it was and cast out, yet would his “inner light” continue, as before, to yield him the best wisdom about the situation before him of which he was then capable. And as such he must follow it with his uttermost devotion. Yet at the time, as I have said, all was darkness and confusion. And the confusion spread and the darkness deepened as the months passed. The breakdown proved to be greater than I had first realized.²

And yet I am bound to maintain that I am thankful that our Franciscan venture failed, and especially that it failed to become a movement, as it might have.

For one thing, it was full of the folly of Christian pity. It is no less than a crime against life when the superior is sacrificed to the inferior, a crime that is in no wise mitigated nor its effects alleviated when the sacrifice is made by a man’s own free will and choice. Yet the men in our group in Wallington, in training and in actual capability if not in inherited potentiality, were certainly the superiors of all the people among whom we lived and for whom we gave ourselves. The kind of thing the great scholar and musical authority Schweitzer did for years in the jungles of Africa is a sentimental waste of life. Instead of being held up for admiration and emulation, as it has been of recent years in the churches of America, it ought to be cried down as a betrayal of life and a thing of shame. For anyone to admire it is evidence of his degeneracy, even as it was evidence of my own degeneracy when I myself did much the same sort of thing in Wallington. We must become aware of the diseased values that are working in our midst and in ourselves. It is our peril that we awaken to our condition when it is too late.

Our belief in equality, likewise, was a betrayal of life—I should say, rather, of quality of life. Where all are believed equal, the voice of the superior man is drowned in the roar of the mob, and taste tends to gravitate to the level of the gutter. This is happening all over America. Furthermore, wherever this belief in equality spreads, there goes a disbelief in the importance of heredity, of blood. The cry always becomes the weakling’s cry for a change of environment, which the strong man wills to master and to dominate; and all effort to weed out the defectives by cutting off the flow of tainted blood at its source and to build up an improved stock of men and women by attention to intelligent mating, is rendered almost entirely impossible.

All are equal, is the cry. Anybody can marry anybody else. Even the races are equal. There is no good reason, even from the point of view of genetics, why Blacks and Whites should not marry, or Whites and Yellows. Well, if I may anticipate the conclusion that I buttress with massive documentation toward the end of this book, let me say here and now, after such study as is possible to an earnest and intelligent layman, that in my sober judgment it is the suicide of a people when they allow themselves to be made into a “melting pot,” where you no longer have a people but only a hodge-podge of peoples, a stew of conflicting bloods, traditions, values, and tastes. It is the betrayal and surrender of those differentiations that their ancestors painfully achieved through many thousands of years, and which give their existence on the Earth all its worth and meaning. I am glad my venture failed, if for no other reason, because I am convinced that my preaching of equality would have worked against the only kind of life I believe to be worth striving for—that is, quality of life.

But there is another reason that I am glad it failed, and for me a very important reason. If it had succeeded and had become a movement, I can but wonder whether, with my absorption in it and with the reassurance as to its soundness that its very success would have tended to give it, I should ever have been able to achieve enough perspective to discover the errors in it and get rid of them. Might not this very triumph of my spirit have brought my spiritual growth to a standstill? Might not my “success” have become my grave?

As things actually worked out, however, my venture broke down, and the immediate effect was chaos. Bit by bit my whole world fell to pieces, and passed into solution. I doubted everything. Nothing escaped the acid of my skepticism. I questioned the soundness of the teaching of Jesus, the existence of any moral order in the universe, the validity of the mystical experience, the doctrine of human equality and all the collectivist philosophies that have been built upon it. I challenged even those beliefs upon which depended my very sense of security in the face of the universe. I did not know whether I should ever again be sure of anything. The years from 1929, when I left Wallington, to 1932, when I came to the Farm, were years of bitter struggle and inner chaos of mind and soul—the period of the worst desolation that I have ever known.

* * * * * * * * *

At the Farm it was never any part of my purpose to earn all my living from the land. I felt that for me, just then, to try to do so would frustrate my very object in going there. I wanted solitude, and silence, and the contact with the earth and with the vast spaces of mountains, but also I wanted free time to study, to think, and to write. It was my purpose, therefore, to use the land so to meet my own requirements that my need of money would be reduced to a minimum, and my independence of the world about me greatly increased. And it was. In the journal, which I kept at the time, there is a statement that in the week that had just passed my outlay for food came to fifty cents.

It was here at the Farm that I soon settled myself to continue the exploration of the teaching of Friedrich Nietzsche, which I had dipped into even before leaving Wallington. In fact, he was a part of the turmoil that had ended in my breakdown. And it probably took me the best part of a decade to come to terms with him.

I am well aware that the very name “Nietzsche” is a definite roadblock in the minds of many. But I judge that, as a rule, this is not because such people have read him firsthand, or with any degree of thoroughness. Rather is it that Nietzsche’s name has been blackened and his teaching misrepresented by those who lacked the insight and comprehension to appreciate what he was about, or by those who had reason to hate all he stood for.

I myself, as I have already intimated, did not take to him easily. My reactions, from the start, were mixed. On the one hand, I was drawn to him not only by an almost unmatched beauty of literary form, as I found it first in his Zarathustra, but above all by the unquestionable elevation of his spirit and purpose, and by the singleness and depth of his dedication to his task of exalting the life of man. On the other hand, I kept coming upon ideas and conclusions as to necessary means that were so anathema to all my previous and still lingering ideals and assumptions, that more than once I threw down the book I was reading with the exclamation, “If that is where he would take me, I’ve had enough.” But already his barbed idea was stuck in my mind, and the more I resisted it, the deeper it worked its way in. And besides, almost from the beginning and deeper than the resistance of my head, there was my intuition that here was a man whom I should not be able to lay aside until I had read all he had written. To my head he might stand before me as an implacable foe, but yet more deeply I felt that he was my friend, and that ultimately I must range myself on his side, that to me as to every other man he had come to bring more exalted life.

In any case, he was a force with which I was compelled to reckon. He leveled such an attack on my very ideals and all the world that had given me birth, that I simply dared not go on leaving him unreduced in my rear. So I turned to face him squarely, and fought him, with the result that in the end he reduced me. I read twice all that he wrote, some sixteen published volumes, and several biographies about him—all this before I read any interpretations of him, for I wished, before I knew what others made of him, to get my own reaction fresh and firsthand. For four years the best of my free time went into the study of Nietzsche. But despite all this I must add that since the late Thirties I have looked into him comparatively little. I am quite able to criticize him, and some of his teaching I reject. Nevertheless, taking him as a whole, I am very ready to admit that I stand as his ally. I look at the fast-shaping issues of our day from his side and from his angle, and I believe that the future belongs to the people who accept the essentials of his teaching.

In this chapter it was impossible to do more than introduce Nietzsche, as one of the two men who have had the greatest influence on my outlook, Jesus being the other. In my next chapter I wish to give a picture of what Jesus meant to me in the years when his hold upon me was strongest; and in the one following that, to present Nietzche, with special emphasis on his thought. I shall try to make it clear why I find so much in common between Nietzsche and Jesus, and which of them, to my way of thinking, cuts the more deeply into life, and contains the more promise for the future of Western man.

1944, 1973.

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¹ Here, and throughout this chapter, I use a fictitious name.

² I would not for a minute minimize or forget the spiritual exaltation born of the dedication of those days. Something in me still stirs deeply when I think of the call they made upon us to be ever-girt for battle, to trust the unseen, to live in the present, to make life a constant spending of oneself. I love their abandon and reckless gambling, and their scorn and defiance of the paltry prudence of a mean, money-grubbing, ease-loving commercial age. And often I feel that I shall not have brought my life to the heights it aims toward until, without losing the broader, fuller, better-balanced vision of the present days, I shall have recovered more of the spirit that filled those days with so pure, even though so exotic, a beauty.