The Husbandman of the Visible Universe

Extract

Husbandman’ is the word; for, if not wholly adequate, as one word could hardly be, it does, better than any other, express man’s status and function in the universe, and especially in the visible universe, so that its immediate concrete sense and the analogies to which it gives rise are verified essentially and verified to the full. Whatever is verified essentially of mankind is verified in Adam, the head of this family, and in Christ in whom this headship is restored. We should beware of any kind of mere generalisation—even the generalisation, ‘All men are sinners,’ is made at a level quite different from that of such an essential judgment —and emphatically we must not be understood to mean ‘in fact men are most commonly tillers of the soil’. Man has the cosmic function of husbandman whether this last statement is verified or not. But then it follows that our meaning is deeper than the level of fact and of generalisations of fact.

We should note that the whole of the sub-human creation is ordained in and through man in the cosmic unity. The sub-human world is not fully a world and not fully a cosmos by itself. From it may be drawn suggestions of unity but not really a unity of its own. In man as part (head) of the visible creation, the visible world has a unity of which man is the guarantee and ‘sacrament’ (in the same sense in which it may be said the Pope is ‘sacrament’ of the Church’s unity).