Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> IN EVERY culture and in all ages human society has known the tension between the position assigned to a man and the ability which the man’s own inner resources allow him to display. The former endues all that he does with the force of law and of the commission which stands behind him; the latter bestows on him as a person immediate credibility and is the convincing justification of his claims. Only rarely are these two things entirely divorced. The man with gifts claims a position commen- surate with those gifts; the man with position is obliged to try to fill it. A disproportionate emphasis on one of these elements at the expense of the other usually indicates a disturbed and strained situation on the verge of conflict and threatened from within either by revolution or by equally drastic reaction. It is a serious symptom-especially in societies where high value is attached to office-when there is nothing more by way of authority to which appeal can be made than the given- ness of the office as an institution and when the office-holder (to borrow a phrase from Lichtenberg) invests his office with dignity only to the extent to which he himself is invested with the dignities of office. But even the man with particular ‘gifts’ and in that sense a special ‘vocation’ must acknowledge the prevailing order or at least some higher order and norm and be willing to serve it if he is to win men’s confi- dence and not merely to cause upheaval and destruction. The authority of office and the validity of personal endowment can become a danger to one another; but they also exercise mutual attraction and support. This twofold law applies also in the sphere of religion. Here too we find the familiar conflicts painted for the most part in much too emphatic blacks and whites between the functionary and the charis- matic types of authority between the priests and the prophets between the champions of the sacral system and the witnesses to direct religious (SP)