Liturgy and Politics

Extract

The problem of politics is essentially the problem of reconciling personal relationships to public or impersonal human relationships. For we all feel a tension between the two. We begin life almost wholly within a context of personal relationships – with parents or parental substitutes who present themselves to us as individuals. It is only gradually that we discover a wider world or relationships with people who are not members of the family – that is to say, people not familiar to us. Slowly, as childhood proceeds our original personal relationships are surrounded by a rarefied and less know-able but ever-expanding ‘atmosphere’ of unfamiliar humanity. This ‘atmosphere’ of impersonal humanity can only be partially explored, and has for the most part to be taken for granted. Of course, no sharp dividing line can be drawn between those whom we know in a real, personal way and the surrounding mass of humanity which we can know only in a notional, impersonal way, but just as the familiar air of Birmingham or Bermuda gradually thins out as we go upwards, until we come to a point where we quite obviously need some artificial means for continuing to breathe there at all, so we gradually come to a point, in the exploration of our human surroundings, where we need to set up some artificial, institutional framework if we are to carry on living in that rarefied atmosphere. That is to say we need to set up a political order and to develop a political consciousness.