A brief note, which I received from Fr. Rector the other day, began in a completely detached manner with the information that “the College is celebrating its Golden Jubilee next year, and we intend publishing a special Jubilee Number.” Anyone could see, and I saw at once, that all was as it should be. But all was well only thus far. It became evident that the initial detachment of the note, which was soon to become regrettably unimpersonal, was utterly misleading, for the note ended with the summary request – “please write me an article for it, within two weeks if possible.” There seemed not to be a shadow of a doubt in the Rector’s Mind that the manner of the ending of the note was the only possible, the only logical conclusion of the manner of its beginning. It was clear too that the Rector regarded the whole of his note and every part of it with the same serene composure, whence I inferred that to see in any part a reason for disturbance was illegitimate. Here, I recognized, was the authentic voices of Authority—here, if ever, was an occasion for obedience. It was not for nothing that I had been among the earliest to enter within, by the newly-opened gates of St. Joseph’s College, and abandon hope, some fifty years ago.
My earliest recollections of myself as an early pupil at St. Joseph’s (or, to be exact, at the subsidiary Infant institution of St. Charles’) are of a state of resentment regarding a fact in world-history, the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, and of a state of satisfaction with a statement in geography. “The Sinhalese,” so ran the arresting and satisfactory statement in my geography book, “are polite, kind to their Children, and fond of learning.” These two personal reactions were more or less simultaneous. I suppose the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria represented the nearest approach to the apothcosis of a human being that has been ventured on since the days of the Roman Empire. I was not of course aware of this at the time. But I was old enough to understand that Victoria,”—the great, the good ” was in some way the symbol of the greatness and the goodness of the British Empire. And this was the occasion of my earliest adventure in scepticism.
I could not admit the goodness of the imperial edict—for I Supposed it to be an imperial edict—which required that tired and hungry children at school should walk in procession in the sun from Darly road to the Race-course, there, to await the enaction of some tedious ceremonial, and return thence in weary procession to Darly Road, in unwilling testimony to some distant glory. Such requirements were neither wise nor good. It is true that at night there was a display of illuminations which were wholly delightful—but a doubt existed in my mind as to whether these had not been designed to beguile the minds of the young, and cloud the real issue, which arose with insistence from the day’s proceedings- Would not a Sinhalese Queen have been a wiser and a better Queen than the English Victoria? For the Sinhalese, I had been credibly informed, were polite and kind to their children, and a Sinhalese Queen would surely not have required of us that weary procession in the sun, which was barely compensated for by the later illuminations, even if one believed the purpose of these to have been purely benevolent. I suppose a child of today, of the age of seven or thereabouts, if his attention were directed to the present article, and its problem from the past, would immediately point out that not only was my reasoning on general matters defective, but that my learning (whatever the merits of the geography books of that day) was clearly Inadequate by modern standards, for I have seen to have known nothing about the Tamils. Processions of school children, it might be argued further, are organized with alarming frequency nowadays, and they appear to be concerned with reasons not of imperial, but of purely insular policy. “We do not know,” I might be told. “Whether a Sinhalese Queen, supposing we had one, would really have been as wise and good, as you, with your simple faith in a geography book, seem to imagine.” But we do know that Sinhalese Ministers, for reasons of their own, often like to make us walk in procession, really long distances in the sun. It is true that an elephant, with or without his Minister, sometimes joins in these processions. But there are hardly ever any illuminations afterwards, at least not on the scale, on which, you seem to hint, they were generally commanded by English Queens.
I think there would be much sense and justice in such a protest, if such a protest were forthcoming from the school-child of today. If a prescient writer were willing enough, a whole book,—but, I am afraid, a wholly dismal book might be written on “The Future of the Small Boy and the State Procession.” Meanwhile, it must remain a matter for mournful speculation, how far, if at all, the Small Boy of the future will be able to survive the relentless requisitions in faith and fortitude that will be involved in the State Processions that are to come. I am thinking of course of the child in state-provided, state-aided schools.
I suppose the temper of an epoch may be estimated best if one considers the metaphors and symbols to which it has instinctively and perhaps unconsciously turned for the expression of its inner meaning and intention. Ceylon is now at the eve of a new era of autonomy and its people are called on to visualize a conception of the state. It is a sphere where imagination verges on prophecy. To my mind there is something ominous, a sinister presage of the complexion and quality of the state that is to come, in the place assigned by unerring choice to the symbols of the Jewel and the Casket, in the Ministerial announcement of the advent of Free Education. I fear these symbols have come to stay, and are the portents of a ruling thought. The Jewel and the Casket will all too appropriately take their place upon the Elephant in the State Procession,—for each “captain jewel ” as it comes, but not “as seldom coming in the long year set ” will unfailingly call for instant and for total jubilation. If in fact we are on the eve of an era of government by organized mass-emotion, with the State Procession as a recognized ritual, could any symbols more befitting than those of the Jewel and the Casket have been chosen to be the mystical tokens of the substance and the means of ordinary legislation? If any be inclined to consider this conjecture on the function of the State Procession too pessimistic. I would remind them that we live in a land where, about twenty-five years ago, ” Temperance” being the ” Captain Jewel ” of the day, most of the adult population walked in procession, jubilant in the mystical wish and the power to abolish taverns— though most of the surviving units of those processions may now be seen, standing most reasonably and regretfully in queues to await the opening hour of such taverns as they had failed to abolish in procession. If, as I fear, the State Procession is on the way to become a normal means of government, and the demonstrative joy of school-children over each new found jewel becomes more and more a matter of administrative necessity, then the education of children must inevitably be fashioned to the end of their bearing a ready, a constant, and as far as possible, a joyful witness to the unfailing goodness of an infallible state. Teachers will have an important function in the general design of government, and a new authority as the writers of official textbooks. With the provision of Free Education, the State will tend to become largely a School-aided State.
I do not say that such developments are inevitable,—but they seem at least overwhelmingly possible, if one may gauge the main currents of the future, by the actual and tragic “dividing of forces on their ways ” in the recent crisis of education. And from the first moment that it appears reasonable to anticipate an ambiguous destiny for the State-aided School, it becomes clear that the only tolerable destiny for St. Joseph’s College is that of a private school.—that is if St. Joseph’s is to remain what it has been from the beginning—a school whose principal function is the initiation of its pupils into the habit of religious thought and religious living.
It is a fact that most Eastern peoples have continuously up to now, been, as it were, innately disposed towards a religious view of life, and it has been the function of all schools in the East and of all teachers, until very recent times, to foster and develop the natural aptitude of their pupils for the apprehension of the supernatural. The result has been best expressed in the current statement that religious thought is the traditional thought, the common thought of the East, and the history of Buddhist Ceylon is there, for instance, to prove it. The special significance of St, Joseph’s College for the present and the future lies in the fact that it is a Catholic School in an Eastern island—a significance which has received an added emphasis from the amazing fact that in the recent crisis of education in this country Christian religious authority alone has risen to the need of the hour in spirited defence of our traditional way of thinking. The dominant control of the secular civilization of the West. Our generation has witnessed both the unprincipled exaltation and the consequent disaster of Nationalism. In the days when I went to school it used to be urged as a reproach by critics in Europe that Eastern peoples, and especially the Indian people had no conception of nationalism, and were therefore incapable of political development. When the disease of nationalism became manifest in Europe, Tagore’s was the first voice. I believe to be raised in prophetic warning. Today. Dean Inge, also a prophet, but one who is wise after the event, declared that “nationalism has become an unmitigated curse.” It is not that Dean luge appears to be conscious even today of the sin of nationalism as an end in itself he argues rather that ideas in themselves are liable to become dangerous when they reach the East, “which includes Russia, as we are beginning to realize rather uneasily.”
To this prophet the evil in a sin like that of unrestrained nationalism, which results in opportunist imperialism, becomes even partially clear only when the prophet and his kindred seem likely to be the next victims called on to bear the consequences of the sin. Prophecy of this kind is undoubtedly one of the conveniences of unmitigated or unprincipled thinking. In philosophy, those of us who became acquainted with its rudiments at St. Joseph’s College have lived to see the exaltation, in various forms and degrees, of the sub-conscious, under the influence of the Freudian psychology,—the exaltation of that subconscious which the Psalmist referred to when he spoke of “my substance in the lower parts of the earth.” It was natural that in ethics as a consequence, casualism should be tendered as a substitute for casuistry. In literature, we have seen the exaltation of D. H. Lawrence, who saw in his private monomania a possible religion. We have seen in these later days the offering of other substitutes for religion, such as the irreverent mysticism which Mr. Gerald Heard expounds in his ” Preface to Prayer ” —a mysticism which aspires to profit by the absorption of Catholic experience, while rejecting the Catholic experience of the Redemption—which promises answer to ” prayer,” first from the sub-conscious, next from the “para-conscious” or the sphere of extra-sensory perception, and suggests as the motive of contemplation the progressive fulfilment by the race of the fair promises of biology. —Mr. Heard being utterly heedless of Chesterton’s timely warning that “it is exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins.” But the chief significance of Mr. Heard’s system of prayer lies in this, that it is thoughtfully tendered as an alternative or a possible deterrent to a world which, he finds, is terribly tempted to return to Catholicism —most people having lost the habit but begun to feel the need of prayer, “because our society of today is not a praying society, but a progressive society.” It was no doubt inevitable that the “progressive society ” of the West should begin to hope that since progress alone discovered the way to the atom bomb, prayer alone might be able to find a way out of it.
It may be said in general of the philosophy, the literature and the art of the West in the last half-century that it is has largely consisted in a remorseless reflection of the last and logical consequences of the errors initiated at the birth of the purely progressive society from hundred years ago. when a purely secular thought began to consecrate itself to the function of a progressive or purely opportunist idealization of the successive mistakes of the succeeding centuries,— the last mistake in the life of the progressive society being the atom bomb, which has itself become the object of a tentative idealism in the name of an immensity without limit and without reason in the industrialism of the future, with the large assumption, in the actual circumstances of the progressive society, of a future on the planet for industrialism or for anything else.
Dean Inge has lately suggested that the Renaissance and the Reformation which brought about the birth of the progressive society, were “domestic affairs of Western Europe,”- much in the manner of a man who might be arguing with the police that a crime in his household was purely a matter for the family cupboard. I find that the most winning of the ” Win the Peace” literature that has followed the ending of the world-war is the pamphlet which has revealed the secrets of a long-unpoliced cupboard, and has intelligently discerned in Luther the spiritual ancestor of Hitler’s self: while another penetrating critic, Mr. F. L. Lucas (who surely has the spiritual gift of “discernment of spirits “) has recognized in D. H. Lawrence ” Hitler’s John the Baptist.” Such “domestic affairs of Western Europe” might have concerned us less, who are of this Eastern island, if the actual “bad eminence.” in the world of the English language had not involved all Eastern countries in a deluge of bad thinking, and if, in the midst of this deluge (to choose a particular mishap) an element of undue obsequiousness to the Prince of the World in this island itself had not prompted those who are entrusted with the direction of a purely secular education to make an acquaintance with the thought of D. HI. Lawrence, for instance) a dictate of fashion if not an academic imposition among young students in the University of Ceylon.
The fact of such a mishap and the possibility of more serious misadventures in the directing of education make us wonder whether St. Joseph’s College may not be called upon in the future to fill the functions not only of a Catholic school but also to a great extent of a Catholic University. The provision by the State of free education “from the Kindergarten to the University” brings with it the definite danger that the convenience of the State will become the end of all education, and that this consideration may over-rule all others, including the retention of personal freedom in the lip of the community. The day may very well come when the responsibility of providing a sure shelter and safeguard for the ideal of personal freedom may devolve entirely on independent religious institutions, and Catholic teachers may be found to be those who are specially qualified by their principle to preserve and to promote that ancient harmony in the common life which was exemplified in the statement that “the Sinhalese are polite, kind to their children, and fond of learning.”
Much more was lately lost to the country than was commonly realised in the general acceptance of the policy of free education by the State, with the curtailment of the advance of avowedly religious education. The former harmony of life, the peace and the politeness of the soul, which the world has largely lost or is losing, might have been preserved for future generations in this Eastern island much more easily than elsewhere, if spiritual perception had been sufficiently diffused for a common appreciation of the issue by man of all religions, who’ are loyal to their creeds, or at least by all men who sincerely love the virtue of politeness.
It may be pertinent here to quote the independent verdicts on State education of two representative English intellectuals, who whatever the eccentricities towards which they have tended in the course of their literary lives, being themselves among the victims of the “domestic affairs of Western Europe,” have at last been conscientious in their search of the true politeness. Their recent verdicts may lie recalled the more appositely because both have lived and moved and curiously regarded the way of the world during the critical half-century which has passed since St. Joseph’s College came into existence. Mr. Aldous Huxley affirms his belief in Free Education, with the important qualification that the State should provide the funds, and religious bodies alone should provide the education -while Mr. Middleton Murry implies the same attitude in his remark that ” ideally, the democratic State should provide an education of its citizens into the knowledge of its own essentially instrumental character “- into the knowledge, that is to say of that sacramental view of life, which religious thinking alone can sustain. “The earthly city is everywhere today,” insists Mr. Murray, “and evil everywhere.”
If the earthly city in the course of the coming half-century were to make for itself “a local habitation ” in this Eastern island, as elsewhere, it would then become the intimate responsibility of St. Joseph’s College to teach with a special emphasis the lesson that is latent in all Christian teaching, the lesson of sacrifice, because to the coming generations of Catholics in Ceylon, religious living in the world may no longer be possible without its incessant practice, —while the temptations to abstain from the requisite sacrifice, in place or power, wealth or office or even bare security, may with the years become more and more formidable.
It is possible that the recent crisis in our education is only a local instance of the universal division of which Maritain wrote;—”I think that two immanent tendencies intersect at every point in the history of the world and affect everyone with their momentary complexes; one tendency draws upward everything in the world which participates in the divine life of the Church, which is in the world but not of the world, and follows the attraction of Christ, the Head of the human race. The other tendency draws downward everything in the world which belongs to the Prince of the World . . . . .”
But can it be also that the moment has really come, or is soon about to come, of which some years ago Maritain spoke prophetically in “The Things that are not Caesars?” “Nowadays” he said. “The devil has made such a mess of everything in the system of life on earth, that the world will presently become uninhabitable for anybody but Saints … Merely to exist one has to expose oneself to too many snares. Christian heroism will one day become the sole solution for the problem of life. Then as God proportions His graces to human needs and tempts nobody beyond his strength, we shall doubtless see coincident with the worst condition in human history a flowering of sanctity.”
If the time that was foretold here has already come, or is very soon to come, if as many signs seem to indicate, we have really reached “the worst condition in human history ” than, I think, only one possible future is logically open to St. Joseph’s College.
For half-a-century St. Joseph’s College has filled a truly honourable part as a school for Catholic citizens. Perhaps a more noble future awaits it. For my part. I believe that the moment has come for the decision that St. Joseph’s College should become clearly and consciously, and as far as possible, exclusively, a school for Catholic saints.
LIONEL DE FONSEKA.
Blue and White magazine, 1946.
.