640 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
the analogy of this creative effect of the economy of energy in the life of
Man's body physical, we might surmise that, in the life of his body social,
Religion would be likely to be starved so long as thought and will were
pre-occupied with Economics (as they had been in the West since the
Industrial Revolution) and with Politics (as they had been in the West
since the Western renaissance of a deified Hellenic state) ;J and we might
infer from this that the regimentation that was now being imposed on the
Western Society's economic and political life would be likely to liberate
Western souls for fulfilling the true end of Man by glorifying God and
enjoying Him once again.

This happier spiritual prospect was at least a possibility in which a
dispirited generation of Western men and women might catch a beckon-
ing gleam of kindly light; and, with this possibility in view, an historian
recalling the history of the emergence of the Western Civilization out of a
post-Hellenic interregnum would recollect that, in that episode, a psychic
energy that had been transferred from Economics to Religion during an
antecedent Hellenic Civilization's disintegration had eventually pro-
duced, as an incidental economic by-product of a life in which Religion
had come to be the lode-star, economic effects which had been beyond
the compass of a Roman oecumenical government commanding the
total resources of a great society and the skill, experience, and good will
of an admirable professional civil service. A decline and fall of agricul-
ture in Italy, which the imperial Roman regime had proved as impotent
to arrest as had their republican predecessors the Gracchi, was not only
arrested but was reversed by monks of the Benedictine Order following
the rule of a founder who had prescribed for his spiritual sons a daily
stint of manual labour as an alternative way of serving God that would
provide a psychologically wholesome foil to the singing of the Liturgy.2
This first chapter of Western history might perhaps repeat itself in a
chapter that, in A.D. 1952, still lay unwritten in the womb of the Future.
The transfer of psychic energy to Religion from Economics might once
again save Homo Economicus from himself by saving him from the neces-
sity of artificially reducing his economic productivity as the only means
at his command for defending himself against the noxious effects of an
excessive economic appetite. In previous chapters3 we have noticed
that the demonic physical 'drive* which Modern Western Man had put
into his economic activities through the mechanization of his technology
had manufactured a psychological brake for itself by generating the
trade-union spirit in the industrial working class and the civil-service
spirit in the middle class. These defensive psychic mechanisms had
proved effective for the negative purpose for which they had been moun-
ted ; but they had protected Homo Faber Mechanicus against the tyranny
of his clockwork at the cost of taking the heart out of his handiwork, and
they had taken the heart out of his handiwork at the cost of depotentiat-
ing economic activities on which the mechanization of Technology had
placed too grievously heavy a psychic load. It might be that, in the long

* See X. ir. 7-15.

* See HI. iii. 266, with the passages quoted there, in footnotes a and 3, from Saint
Benedict's Rule. 3 On pp. 563-74 and 604-6, above.