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PASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY
relation by betraying the faith of others in us we feel that we
have betrayed ourselves. We experience then the kind of fear
that Berdyaev calls ‘anguish’. It is not, essentially, fear of the
person we have betrayed, for the very existence of love between
one person and another is the negation of that form of fear. We
fear, rather, the abysmal darkness of self-isolation: we
experience a peculiar horror of that within ourselves which
jeopardises the relation in which and through which
everything that makes us human is manifested and expressed.
Part of the recurring tragedy of civilisation is to be explained
by the fact that as human societies become more complex in
structure and more sophisticated, they make upon the time,
energy and loyalty of the individual increasingly stringent
demands. The organisation lays hold of him and through every
educational and moral force conforms him to its own shape, and
commands his services for its own utilitarian purposes. Simply
because these purposes are utilitarian, the social relationships
through which they are fulfilled exacerbate in the individual
both the fear of weakness and the will to power. And these
motivations encourage a frame of mind, essentially competitive
and individualistic, which is inimical to the establishment of
personal relationships and favourable to the development of
tyrannies. The totalitarian state, in which the individual is
merely a cog in the machine, is merely the end-result of this
process of man’s self-dehumanisation.
If Christianity has never hesitated to set forth with the starkest
realism the uncompromising nature of the spiritual laws that
govern the destiny of man, it is only because it is uniquely
conscious of the heights and depths of human potentiality. It
sees with clear vision how deep is the abyss into which
individuals and civilisations must plunge if men and women can be
persuaded to confuse their need for security with their need for
communion, and in this confusion to live in the expectation that
by the elaboration and refinement of their resources of material
prosperity and physical power they will assuage the hungers of
their souls.
Christianity and Forgiveness
It is not a part of the task we have undertaken in this book
to expound the Christian doctrine of forgiveness. It is necessary
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