At the same time barbarism is increasing. In the first place, it is spreading from the third world: negatively, as the revenge of the revolted slaves, which is the cause of all the destructiveness of ‘cultural revolutions’; and positively as the witness, whether dionysiac or contemplative, of the irrational continents – including France itself, at whose heart there lies a third world of the soul, the spirit of the Celts, and that of Provence, among others…
Secondly, barbarism is increasing, with a great deal of intellectual embellishment, in those ‘neo-revolutionary’ circles that we have just described. People sometimes feel the lack of a primitive sense of the sacred to which they can respond with every ounce of their being.
Lastly, and perhaps most fruitfully, barbarism is increasing, not in opposition to modern society, but within it. There are two main aspects to this ‘internal’ barbarism that seem amenable to enrichment by beauty: that of the face and, to borrow a play on words from Edgar Morin, that of the arche and the Ark.
At the very moment that the face is disappearing from the art of ‘culture’, barbaric forms of it haunt us on every side – in close-up on the cinema and television screens, in advertisements and posters; and on the streets our last folk art, the beautification of the faces of women. The face may be mysterious, rapt in its very beauty, still unopened. Or it may be the first beauty, that of youth, eros, almost impersonal, awaiting the adventure of an encounter. Often it is the face of a child that stands out, full of the innocence of paradise, suggesting the reassuring feminine values of domestic comfort and security. Occasionally, as through a rift in the screen, there appear for an instant faces from the lands of suffering, war and famine; emaciated to a state of pure anguish, crucified faces. The most intriguing faces, those most dense with another secret, and the rarest, are those of the dead – such as John XXIII and Che Guevara, two deaths paradoxically acceptable in a world which seems to value nothing but the prolongation of life. The motley variety of faces in which humanity is displayed is blended into a single stream and becomes part of the vulgarized gallery of the imagination. Thus destructured and intermingled, souls are liquified; values, traditions, criteria, regional differences, are dissolved or cease to matter, being merely the object of idle curiosity or careless tolerance. But there remains a beauty that is irreducible, resistant to corrosion by this acid: the face of the human being and the longing for a world-wide communion of faces.
Faced with possible dissolution in this universalizing flux, how can we keep from searching for our own roots? When the surrounding atmosphere threatens to absorb us and disperse us abroad, we need to find a land, an arch” an Ark, where we can be ourselves. The modern city dweller, sensing the threat of abstraction, of being cut off from the elements, is transformed into a nomad of the empty spaces, impelled to embark on a quest for the ancient original roots of being, like those who went in search of the Holy Grail. The urge is ‘neo-archaic’, in the strong sense of the Greek word arche, meaning fundamental, primitive, ideal. The quest leads across the universe and the past. It is the quest of Noah’s Ark adrift on the flood of technology and that of the Ark of the Covenant in a civilization without hope; the quest for a place of silence and beauty where the magnetic patience of generations has given a face to the stones. Here, through the mediation of a land and its history, beauty becomes the expression of a covenant with mystery. On the collective scale there are the great summer migrations in search of the sun and the sea, on whose shores stand ancient temples which, now that the ‘idols’ have disappeared, are simply temples of the beauty of the world. Others climb mountains, traverse forests, or explore ‘caves of the earth’. On the domestic scale, there is the desire, commonplace it is true, to find a regular anchorage in a place of beauty and peace.
Jung describes in his memoirs how he furnished a tower near Lake Zurich. The tower soon became almost a mother to him; returning to it, he rediscovered himself; ” felt that’ was being reborn in the stone.’ Not in order to shut himself away, but in order to commune with things; ‘I saw myself in each tree, in the lapping of the waves, in the clouds, in the animals that came and went, in objects.’ He prepared his own wood, lit the fire, went to the spring for water, and sat in the light of a living flame. ‘Such simple tasks make people simple and to be simple is difficult indeed.’ In silence and in harmony with nature, ideas both very old and very new emerge: ‘Here creation and play are closely allied.’
Some, rejecting the alternation of urban grind and a more real existence, even abandon city life for good, and bring ancient villages back to life, making a modest living by supplying the ‘neoarchaic’ movement with necessary objects or services. Among them there are Christians, quiet harbingers of a renewal of old eremitical and communal ways of life.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
