Him Alone You Must serve

A Perennial desire of mankind is to turn our backs on the vainglorious elites, all the pompous princes and plutocrats with their multiplying magnificence and ever-expanding egos and proliferating palaces and accumulating affectations and trek out into the country where we can live free, plain, natural. We can humbly refuse to bow down to the official idols. We can give up the frantic pursuit of money and titles. We can withhold support for wars of conquest.

Let’s look at some examples.

Laozi

Laozi (Lao tzu) wrote in his Tao Te Ching (Dao De Jing) Chapter 53 of those who:

“wear elaborate richly embroidered clothes, eat and drink in excess with their sharp swords at their sides, these are surely the robber barons. This is not in keeping with the Way."

Lao-tzu respected the humble. In Chapter 78 he wrote:

"There is nothing softer and weaker than water, And yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things. For this reason there is no substitute for it.”

Laozi taught that we should not try to manipulate Nature but instead live in harmony with Nature.

Buddhist monk in meditation

Diogenes of Sinope

Another Diogenes, Diogenes Laertius, in his Lives of Eminent Philosophers, told of Diogenes of Sinope’s love of simplicity:

One day, observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away the cup from his wallet with the words, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living."

Diogenes thought little of government officials:

Once he saw the officials of a temple leading away some one who had stolen a bowl belonging to the treasurers, and said, "The great thieves are leading away the little thief."

Diogenes also disrespected Alexander the Great. Plutarch told of how many came to praise Alexander

“but contrary to his expectation, Diogenes of Sinope, who then was living at Corinth, thought so little of him, that instead of coming to compliment him, he never so much as stirred out of the suburb called the Cranium, where Alexander found him lying along in the sun.

When he saw so much company near him, he raised himself a little, and vouchsafed to look upon Alexander; and when he kindly asked him whether he wanted anything, "Yes," said he, "I would have you stand from between me and the sun."

Alexander was so struck at this answer, and surprised at the greatness of the man, who had taken so little notice of him, that as he went away he told his followers, who were laughing at the moroseness of the philosopher, that if he were not Alexander, he would choose to be Diogenes.

Thomas Jefferson

In Notes on the State of Virginia Jefferson wrote:

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on casualties and caprice of customers. Dependance begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. This, the natural progress and consequence of the arts, has sometimes perhaps been retarded by accidental circumstances: but, generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption.

Alexis de Tocqueville

In Democracy in America, Volume II Tocqueville wrote of the private initiative of ordinary folk:

Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds—religious, moral, serious, futile, extensive, or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it be proposed to advance some truth, or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever, at the head of some new undertaking, you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

William Wordsworth

Wordsworth lamented:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Kindred Spirits (1849) by Asher Brown Durand depicts Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant in the Catskill Mountains.

Henry David Thoreau

In 1849 Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience was published. He stated:

I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.

Thoreau’s lived like a Native American for two years and two months near Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Walden, or Life in the Woods published in 1854, chronicles Thoreau’s experiment in living:

I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.

Jesus Christ

Jesus went out into the wilderness and fasted. Here he was tempted by the devil.

Luke 4:5 -8

Then leading him to a height, the devil showed him in a moment of time all the kingdoms of the world and said to him, 'I will give you all this power and their splendour, for it has been handed over to me, for me to give it to anyone I choose. Do homage, then, to me, and it shall all be yours.' But Jesus answered him, 'Scripture says: You must do homage to the Lord your God, him alone you must serve.'

The Desert Mothers & Fathers

The Desert Mothers & Fathers were Christian holy women & men who lived mainly in the Egyptian desert during the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries.

St. Syncletica was one of their number. She said: "We ought to govern our souls with discretion and to remain in the community, neither following our own will nor seeking our own good. We are like exiles: we have been separated from the things of this world and have given ourselves in one faith to the one Father. We need nothing of what we have left behind. There we had reputation and plenty to eat; here we have little to eat and little of everything else."

St. Benedict

He lived from 480 – 543 and founded the monastery at Monte Cassino. His sister St. Scholastica founded a convent nearby. He wrote the Rule of St. Benedict.

Here are some excerpts from the Rule:

In Chapter 4 we are advised “To become a stranger to the world's ways.” and “To prefer nothing to the love of Christ.”

In Chapter 35 we are taught “Let the brethren serve one another, and let no one be excused from the kitchen service except by reason of sickness or occupation in some important work. For this service brings increase of reward and of charity. But let helpers be provided for the weak ones, that they may not be distressed by this work; and indeed let everyone have help, as required by the size of the community or the circumstances of the locality.”

St. Francis by Giotto

Conclusion

Are we really superior? Are we better than the often condemned slave owners of the old South? We purchase products made by some of the millions of slaves held all over the world. Western governments engage in pointless wars and endless occupations. The abortion industry kills tens of millions of children for the "crime" of being a girl.

I am not saying we should avoid all contact with the established order. For example, I think we should vote. We also need insiders to represent our views within the halls of power. Most reform movements gain leverage by establishing an insider/outsider partnership.

I suggest that we establish not utopian communities but merely independent communities where we grow our own food and build our own buildings. We could create communities for men, communities for women, and communities for families. Our goal should be to distance ourselves from the corrupt & powerful.