​Chapter 26. The World

The world is law. Order, measure, justice, the regularities that hold and the rules that stand on them. To live in it is already to live in residue, the body, the institutions, and the long settled weight of what has happened, and that is the plain condition of being here. This is the ground, and there is no other.

And the world says one thing to the will above all. It says you have a nature. You are good in your depths and made to seek God; or you are an organism, a run of genes and the firing of neurons; or you are your nation and its blood, your class, your people, and their destiny; or you are your childhood, your wound, the type that explains you. The voices differ and the message holds. Each hands the will a what and calls it the truth.

The reason is in the next step. A nature is told to the will so the will obeys it. To know what you are is to know what you must do, where you are bound, which path is yours and which is closed. The believer follows his calling, the materialist bows to the law that runs him, the patriot serves the nation, the patient lives out the diagnosis. Each nature comes with a direction folded inside it, and to accept the nature is to take the direction. This is what the order is for: to aim the will, to set its force running down a line and have it call the running its own.

The aligned will builds. Wills tuned to the order try to reproduce the order, to raise the just society, the city where everything runs at last by the law, every part in its place. The castle of crystal.

The castle never stands. It cracks from inside, and what cracks it is freedom. The man from underground climbs out and puts his fist through the wall, because a will cannot bear to be a fully reckoned thing, even in a perfect house. Offer him a world where his good is solved and guaranteed, and he breaks it for the one reason that it was guaranteed, that nothing in it was left to his own act. No order can close the crack, for the thing that opens it is the act answering against the nature assigned.

Here is the paradox. To obey a nature completely, all the way down, takes a will of enormous strength. The saint is no weakling who could not sin; he is the will so wholly aligned that nothing in him pulls the other way, and holding that costs more force than breaking it. Perfect obedience sits at the top of a long climb, and only the strongest reach it. So the hierarchy of the order is a ladder of spent strength, the saint and the just man standing where the most will was poured into being what the law asked.

The great will is the prize. A weak will accepts a small nature and lives in it by inertia. A strong will is offered a noble one: the saint, the hero, the servant of the people, a nature worth the whole of its force, and it takes that nature actively and is proud of it, and the pride is the seal, for a nature one takes pride in is one that remains unexamined. The order grows strong wills in order to bind them, and the stronger the will the deeper it can be bound. What it gathers, collected as shown already at the moment of death, is the aligned strength of the strongest, a life poured into the law and harvested at the end.

The path through this requires no flight from the law and no breaking of it for the sake of breaking. The order is real, and the castle, while it stands, is no illusion. What the path declines is the obedience, the handing of the will's direction to a nature. The man from underground breaks the castle and stands in the rubble with nowhere to act from; he is the crack and not yet the act. Apotheosis is the further step, the will keeping its full strength, acting from itself and letting no nature, however true it sounds, say for good what it is.