JOURNALISM AND JOACHIM'S CHILDREN

ON their birthdays, to ward off the demons that abound, the Twi-speaking peoples of West Africa smear their bodies with eggs. In other lands, where clothing is more complete, expression more verbal and eggs dearer, other customs prevail; it is not unknown for the birthday boy, among his friends, to say a few words about what's on his mind. TIME, the Weekly Newsmagazine, is 30 years old this week. TIME's birthday theses:

P: That despite the "complexities" of the day, democratic public opinion can know enough to make the right decisions--provided that the press and the intellectuals do their job.

P: That public opinion is now hampered by a crisis among the intellectuals over the possibility and meaning of progress.

P: That if this crisis is solved--and there are signs that it will be--an opportunity for great progress lies ahead, especially in the fields of law, government, economics and international relations.

CONFUSION UNDER THE MULBERRIES

In 1953, as always, a lot of conversation goes 'round the news. Some of 1953's mulberry bushes:

The cold war--how to wage it. The Korean war--how to "end" it.

The American Proposition--not so clear at home or abroad as it used to be.

The American scene--changing fast, perhaps faster than the eye follows.

McCarthy--does he menace freedom of thought? Does it matter? What about thought? Does thought get you anywhere? Or is the irrational element in man too strong, as the Freudians suggest? Or are the "forces" of economic history too strong, as the Marxists say?

What about the "eggheads," a term that bobbed up in last fall's campaign and caught on so thoroughly that Adlai Stevenson the other day referred to some of his mail as expressing "the customary egghead ecstasy"? If an egghead is candled, what shows up?

Any of these subjects could serve for birthday reflections. TIME chooses to write about intellectuality, its condition and prospects, because this subject cuts across all the others and directly affects TIME's business: serving public opinion by reporting the news.

Fifty years ago James Bryce, who knew the U.S. as well as any man, raised the question whether democratic public opinion can know enough to do its job. Bryce concluded: "The masses cannot have either the leisure or the capacity for investigating the underlying principles of policy or for mastering the details of legislation. Yet they may . . . attain to a sound perception of the main and broad issues of national and international policy, especially in their moral aspects, a perception sufficient to enable them to keep the nation's action upon right lines."

"Especially in their moral aspects." That assumes a certain agreement on moral standards, a framework of philosophy about man, the world, and the truth in which facts relevant to the news can be assembled, tests applied, and a rational debate carried on. Speaking of the British public, Arthur Balfour said: "Our whole political machinery presupposes a people so fundamentally at one that they can safely afford to bicker." Perhaps "bicker" is too narrow a word for the vast areas of disagreement and debate that a people who are fundamentally at one can fruitfully enjoy.

In the U.S. today, is there enough unity about fundamentals to make for a sensible and fruitful debate on public policies? Are the limits of debate and the final standards of policy clearly and generally understood? To clarify such fundamentals is the duty of the intellectuals, especially the philosophers.

How true is the cliche that this is a time of "growing intellectual confusion"? A short look back--only a hundred years--indicates that, like most cliches, it is all too true. The intellectual climate of the U.S. mid-19th century ranged between the utterly orthodox Longfellow, moralist poet of the man in the street, and the unorthodox Emerson, philosopher of the man in the lecture hall. Their common ground, however, was hard and firm; the author of "Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal," could salute the author of "The moral law lies at the center of nature and radiates to the circumference." Today the idea of an objective, unchanging moral law is hotly denied by many social scientists, defended by other intellectuals and by a lot of non-intellectuals. The resulting confusion, the lack of a common ground, may explain why the man in the street today has no poet and the popular lecture hall no philosopher.

So intellectual confusion has been growing. Why? Is there what an Irishman might call a pattern of chaos?

THE LIMITS OF POLITICS

One fascinating explanation of the modern intellectual crisis is contained in a recent book* by Political Scientist Eric Voegelin of Louisiana State University. His account, written in somewhat technical language, is an intellectual detective story, a quest through the history of Western thought for the culprits responsible for contemporary confusion. Here is a loose, truncated synopsis of his story:

All societies tend to think of themselves as small-scale models of the universe, and of their political institutions as representing the highest truth. To societies before or outside the stream of Western thought that begins with Plato, this tendency has no limit; whatever the ruler wants cannot conceivably conflict with the order of the cosmos; what the ruler says is truth must necessarily be in conformity with the highest truth known to the society. Typical of this kind of absolutism was the Mongol law, "God is high above all, and on earth, Genghis Khan is the only Lord." Genghis' grandson, Kuyuk Khan, was sincerely puzzled by protests from the King of France and the Pope, who complained that he did wrong to massacre Christians and to demand their submission. How could he do wrong when there were no limits on his actions? The Khan told the King and the Pope that his Christian victims were the aggressors, not because they attacked him but because they refused to submit to him. His logic has the ring of Chinese Communist General Wu telling the U.N. that his government cannot possibly be an aggressor in Korea because it is, by definition, peace-loving. Said the Khan:

By the virtue of God,

From the rising of the sun to its setting,

All realms have been granted to us.

Without the Order of God,

How could anyone do anything?

Now, you ought to say from a sincere heart:

"We shall be your subjects;

We shall give unto you our strength ..."

And if you do not observe the Order of God,

And disobey our orders . . .

What shall we know then?

God will know it.

In the West, this kind of absolutist thought, that put truth and morality at the mercy of a ruler, was intellectually destroyed by Plato. He put two kinds of limits on the idea of the state as a representative of the highest truth: 1) the institutions of society could not arbitrarily disregard man's nature (this is the origin of the idea of "inalienable rights"); 2) the soul and its relation with a Supreme Being were higher truths, too solid to be shifted about by shifting political notions. (Plato's fundamentals were still agreed upon in the U.S. of Emerson-Longfellow.)

Christianity went further than Plato: to a Christian, the highest truth was the hope of salvation after death, an idea that could not have a small-scale model in the political institutions of society. The Christian proposition was that the state could represent the soul in its freedom to accept or reject salvation, but the state could not be modeled upon salvation itself.

This was (and is) a hard idea for the Christian to get down. Many early Christians developed a belief in a prompt Second Coming. St. Augustine, however, called the literal belief in the millennium "a ridiculous fable," and tried to separate man's earthly lot of sorrow, insecurity and imperfection from the hope of a heavenly kingdom. For centuries this separation worked because the worsening conditions of life in the Roman Empire suggested anything but an earthly millennium. Heaven appeared the only feasible goal of hope.

ENTER: THE GNOSTICS

By the 12th century, this passive mood about the world was ending. Men had made progress in ordering their earthly affairs; more progress seemed possible. Pressure grew for a formula that would put together man's hope of salvation and his natural and legitimate hope of a better life on earth.

This pressure in extreme form found its man in Joachim of Flora (circa 1132-1202), whom Dante called "the Calabrian abbot filled with the spirit of high prophecy," and who was, in fact, the first Christian to pervert the hope of salvation into a systematic belief in an earthly society of purified and perfected men. Joachim, not finding materials for his formula in Christian or Greek thought, turned to another source: Gnosticism.

A Gnostic is one who seeks to rise above nature and find salvation through "hidden knowledge" rather than through faith and works. Ten centuries before Joachim, Christianity in a hard struggle had driven underground a host of Gnostic sects, but enough Gnosticism survived in Joachim's day to supply material for his formula. The 2nd century Gnostic magicians had been interested in personal salvation, not in social or political progress; Joachim transferred some of their methods and attitudes to the problem of social progress raised by 12th century vigor. Voegelin applies the name Gnostic to Joachim and to many present-day doctrines and attitudes. Gnosticism--ancient, medieval or modern--never had a common dogma. Since a Gnostic detours all check points of reality, weaving his dreams out of his own wishes, he can believe literally anything, and Gnostics of one sect often violently oppose Gnostics of another.

Joachim believed that the story of man on earth was divided into three periods or realms, each corresponding to a person of the Trinity. The Third Realm, said Joachim, was about to begin with the appearance of Dux e Babylone. (In terms of modern Gnosticism, the leader from Babylon would be called Superman or Der Fuehrer, or "the dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of the democratic centralism of the Party.") The Third Realm was to be characterized by wisdom, and after the Third Realm's beginning (set by Joachim for the year 1260), men would soon be so perfect that they would not need any Dux or government or discipline. (Marx's translation: After the triumph of scientific socialism in the classless society, the state would "wither away" because men, purged of the evil of class conflict, would not need it.)

Joachim's Third Realm corrupted the Christian idea by promising perfection on earth; it also transgressed the limits Plato had set upon the state and upon men's tendency to alter the higher truths of philosophy and religion to fit political or material ends. Militarily, Mongol absolutism entered the West through Hungary; philosophically, political absolutism re-entered the West through Joachim. Joachim's invasion was more devastating because the anti-Christian attempt to embrace salvation on earth went beyond Genghis and other primitive societies, and was to produce despotisms and perversions of truth worse than primitive society ever knew.

THE RISE OF THE MODERN GNOSTICS

At first, the Joachimite movement grew slowly. The church condemned Joachim's writings and put down a flurry of Joachimism among some of the Franciscans.* Through religion, the Third Realm entered Russia in the idea of Moscow as "The Third Rome," a last and higher state on earth. (Belief in the Third Rome was welcomed by the czars, used politically by them, and is manipulated by Kremlin propagandists today.)

In the West, Joachim's influence appeared at the extremes of two seemingly opposite movements. The most radical of the English Puritans thought that they could found on earth a "communion of saints" which would take over and perfect temporal government. The vigor of Renaissance humanism created in some minds other delusions about men like gods and another kind of confusion about heaven and earth. Example: Pope Leo X's "Let us enjoy the Papacy which God has given us."

In the 18th century Gnostic activists became openly anti-Christian.* The French Revolution, crowning a Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame and proclaiming man's ability to achieve his salvation on earth, established Gnosticism as the religion of a large part of Western intellectuals and people.

Thereafter, Gnostic influence on thought snowballed. Auguste Comte (1798-1857), whose mark still lies heavily upon the social sciences, set up a system of three states of knowledge; in his Third Realm, called positivism, the scientists would take over "the general direction of this world." Intellectuals who advanced the world toward perfection would achieve immortality in the memory of mankind. Providence was the "Great Being," not God, but a personification of humanity. (A great and in some ways typical 20th century positivist was H. G. Wells, who believed that man was progressing through science to Utopia; Wells's last years, like Comte's, were spent in near-despair.)

Another Gnostic, Nietzsche, went a step further than Comte. Said Nietzsche: "Love yourself through grace. Then you are no longer in need of your God, and you can act the whole drama of Fall and Redemption to its end in yourself." Nietzsche's extravagant tone and his "fascism" repel many "liberals" who do not recognize the essential similarity in idea and historical origin of Naziism and Communism. Harold Laski, a Socialist with a great influence on "liberals" and "progressivists," summed up the Russian Revolution in a political translation of Nietzsche:

"Lenin was surely right when the end he sought for was to build his heaven upon earth and to write the precepts of its faith into the inner fabric of a universal humanity. He was surely right, too, when he recognized that the prelude to peace is a war ... It is, indeed, true in a sense to argue that the [Soviet] Russian principle cuts deeper than the Christian since it seeks salvation for the masses by fulfillment in this life, and, thereby, orders anew the actual world we know."

Besides seeking salvation on earth and thereby lapsing into political absolutism, the modern Gnostic as described by Voegelin has another tendency, one that he shares with ancient and medieval Gnostics. Both Greek and Christian thought holds that man reflects the order of the universe (or of God) when he understands cause & effect and correctly fits his means to his purposes in earthly affairs. But Gnosticism, even in earthly matters, substitutes dreams for reason because it disregards the facts of the world that exists, misunderstands cause & effect, and has no luck in getting where it wants to get. Voegelin believes the Western World far gone in Gnosticism. The symptoms:

"Gnostic societies and their leaders will recognize dangers to their existence when they develop, but such dangers will not be met by appropriate actions in the world of reality. They will rather be met by magic operations in the dream world, such as disapproval, moral condemnation, declarations of intention, resolutions, appeals to the opinion of mankind, branding of enemies as aggressors, outlawing of war, propaganda for world peace and world government, etc. . . ."

The substitution of "magic operations in the dream world" for a politics of reality brought on World War II, which Winston Churchill, its great warrior, called "The Unnecessary War." Voegelin describes the process:

"The model case is the rise of the National Socialist movement to power with the Gnostic chorus wailing its moral indignation at such barbarian and reactionary doings in a progressive world--without, however, raising a finger to repress the rising force by a minor political effort in proper time."

Gnostic influence on Western policy did not stop with the peace of 1945. Says Voegelin: "If a war has a purpose at all, it is the restoration of a balance of forces and not the aggravation of disturbance; it is the reduction of the unbalancing excess of force, not the destruction of force to the point of creating a new unbalancing power vacuum. Instead, the [Western] Gnostic politicians have put the Soviet army on the Elbe, surrendered China to the Communists, at the same time demilitarized Germany and Japan, and in addition demobilized our own army . . . Never before in the history of mankind has a world power used a victory deliberately for the purpose of creating a power vacuum to its own disadvantage . . . Phenomena of this magnitude cannot be explained by ignorance and stupidity. These policies were pursued as a matter of principle, on the basis of Gnostic dream assumptions about the nature of man . . . The enumerated series of actions, as well as the dream assumptions on which they are based, seem to show that the contact with reality is at least badly damaged and that the pathological substitution of the dream world is fairly effective."

Gnosticism, seeping down from the intellectuals to politicians to the people, had become a mass movement affecting the basis of Western life as well as thought. Intellectual imagination, unbridled by reality, produced disregard for both the facts of life and the principles of Western culture, and cut away much of the common ground on which men could meet in rational debate. Gnosticism is the source of 20th century intellectual confusion, the "pattern" in the chaos.

GNOSTICISM IN CURRENT EVENTS

If Voegelin is right, his analysis should throw light on the present and future. Journalism can apply his theory to some areas of "current events":

The Cold War. Gnostics readily accept total "war to end war" or the Lenin-Laski formula of war as a "prelude to peace." Cold war they shun because its objectives are less than the salvation of mankind, and because cold war requires careful calculation of causes & effects, means & ends in the real world. It is hard for a Gnostic to believe that a successful cold war can avoid a total hot war, or that a successful limited war can avoid a larger war.

The Korean War. That is why Gnostics denounce as steps to total war all efforts to win the Korean war. The only war Utopians can think about is Armageddon.

The U.S.S.R. Today. Though a product of Gnosticism, the Soviet Union is not a Gnostic state because the dream cannot be applied to the actual world of man. Internally, the U.S.S.R. is a primitive absolutism of the Genghis Khan type. Like Genghis its rulers manipulate for their own ends their claim as the earthly (and only) representatives of the highest truth At e higher levels of Communist strategy, however, Gnostic ideas lay still dominate the Kremlin mind. The world revolution has not yet been made reality, and Communists are therefore still free to dream about it in Gnostic terms. This accounts for a seeming contradiction: tactically, Russian policy is realist and therefore more effective than Gnostic Western policy strategically and long-range, Russian policy is Gnostic and still seeks trie Marxist millennium of world revolution

The United Nations. The U.N. offered sensible, practical hope jf working put many problems of international politics. Its defects and limitations were serious, numerous and obvious, but on the whole the chance for some political progress seemed to outweigh the dangers. But the Gnostic chorus immediately began chanting of "the Parliament of Man," an instrument of political salvation. This has brought public disillusionment and the practical effect is to damage the U.N.'s prestige among sensible men, who note that the U.N. does not do what the Gnostics say it can do. Yet the extreme U.N. cult flourishes. In grade school, high school and college, programs and projects are built around U.N. Youngsters who do not know about James Madison know about UNESCO, who do not know about the principles of English Common Law know about ECOSOC, who do not know about Aristotle know about ECAFE. UNism (but not the U.N. itself) is a product of the old Gnostic preference for social forms over social substance; the more grandiose and unreal the forms, the more enthusiastically will the Gnostics embrace them.

McCarthyism. Here is an opportunist politician capitalizing on the public frustration that inevitably followed the failures of Gnostic politics. McCarthy's "methods" are indeed deplorable and ought to be curbed by Congress. But the real danger will not be met by the present hysterical exaggeration of McCarthy's effect. Public distrust present of Gnostic hysterical intellectuals exaggeration of could become distrust of all intellectuality. No worse calamity could befall U.S. society, which, because it is so intricately specialized, needs intellectuality as no society did before. The way to meet the threat to intellectuality is by the kind of intellectual guidance to the public that does not end in disappointment, frustration suspicion and fear.

The American Proposition. In its early decades the U.S. succeeded brilliantly in explaining itself to the world. Notably this is not the case today. When the U.S. tries to make friends and influence people, its propagandists are inclined to talk about automobiles, bathtubs and pop music. The Arabs, the Chinese, the Russians aren't listening. Last year in a memorable article Charles Malik of Lebanon begged the U.S. to approach the Arab world at the level of the great truths of Western culture, of the institutions of freedom that reflect those truths. The U.S. has not done so partly because of disagreement among the intellectuals as to the fundamental American message. In consequence, U.S. propaganda languishes. Can former success and present failure have to do with this contrast, the men who wrote the Constitution had a profound regard for the essential truths of Greece and of Christianity, and a passionate interest in the actual history of politics and in the live of actual men; have too many Gnostic U.S. intellectuals been too busy constructing dream worlds out of men that never were?

The Second American Revolution. Material for a restatement of the American Proposition lies in the Second American Revolution, the reorganization of the nation's economic life the last 40 years. The Gnostic intellectuals may not have noticed, but whole new patterns of organizing work, of the relations of management and unions, new "communities" of enterprise have emerged in U.S. society. Intellectual analysis his change would help to form new adjustments of business and government and a new understanding, at home and abroad the contemporary American scene.

PROGRESS WITHOUT DREAMS

The theme of a thousand contemporary U.S. speeches: "Unless moral progress catches up to material progress, it's all up with us. What are moral science's chances?

The first condition of intellectual progress is an end of mostic Gnostic dreams and this condition has started toward fulfillment. For the last 50 years, the positivist approach to knowledge has been rotting away from the top, losing its self-confidence, finding, after all, that it needed the despised "value judgments, and that these could not be extracted from statistics (Kinsey and some other social scientists haven't heard the news of the Positivist decay). Along with the positivist decline has come a revival of the pre-Gnostic views of the world, Mortimer Adler and others have made much more visible the body of Catholic scholastic philosophy resting on Plato and Aristotle. Perhaps more important, for the predominantly Protestant U.S., is the recent movement to restate and strengthen Protestant philosophy and theology. Protestant Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr,* a progressive in politics, insistently reminds that man will not progress on this earth beyond his essential imperfection. Niebuhr says that man sensing his superiority to the rest of earthly creation "assumes that he can gradually transcend [his finiteness] until his mind becomes identical with universal mind. All his intellectual and cultural pursuits . . . become infected with the sin of pride."

Niebuhr believes that "it is quite wrong to define Communism as simply the subordination of the individual to the 'state.' . . . Communism is so cruel and so fanatical because it has a completely erroneous conception of human nature. Living by the illusion that the abolition of a social institution [property] will redeem man of all sin, it naturally feels justified in using any means which will attain this end... There is a certain pathos in the fact that these illusions are merely hard variety of the soft illusions [of] Christian and secular sentimentalists . . ." Moral progress for our day begins with acceptance of Niebuhr's limits, with the proverb: "The trees do not grow up to the sky." In man's world that exists, change is the law--growth and decay. But natures, including human nature, cannot be changed on earth. Rational politics consists in applying what is known about man's nature to the facts of the world as they are--not in trying to fit imagined men into imagined facts.

The world's way out of Gnostic confusion depends largely on the U.S. Most nations were set in their present mold by revolutions that came after the great Gnostic triumph of the French Revolution. The American Revolution (like the British) occurred before this turning point, and basic American institutions and attitudes are, therefore, relatively free of Gnostic influence. The U.S. Constitution does not invent rules of morality and try to fit men to them by government fiat. The Constitution assumes that the moral code exists as the substance of society, and sets up a form in which a particular society can pursue its legitimate goal of making sense in politics. The specific terms of the Constitution cannot be applied to all peoples, but the spirit of government limited by moral law can be.

Would moral progress halt or slow down material progress? No doubt the rapid advance of physical science was made partly under the stimulating idea that men were gods who could change nature. But to join Gnostics Anonymous, to swear off that particular stimulus, does not mean that society has to forgo further material progress. Suppose Faust did sell his soul for worldly knowledge; in what court can Mephisto enforce collection of future installments? Provided only that Faust no longer seeks the forbidden (because impossible) heaven-on-earth, Mephisto cannot repossess. He who sups with material progress must use a long spoon--and bring his lawyer; but a return to the main stream of Western thought does not require spurning utterly the material world. Excessive love of materiality has naturally accompanied the Gnostic dream, but the remedy is to end the dream, not to indulge in a hypocritical modern mood described by Richard Wilbur's couplet:

We milk the cow of the world, and as we do We whisper in her ear, "you are not true."

The mood that holds material progress unworthy and moral progress impossible is produced by frustration and disappointment at the collapse of Gnostic visions. Modern skepticism is the burned child's blister. When Joachim of Flora's prophecy collapsed, one of his followers, Salimbene of Parma, wrote: "After the year 1260 passed, I entirely laid aside [Joachim's] doctrine, and I am disposed henceforth to believe nothing save what I see." A natural reaction--which can lead either to a better intellectuality or toward stagnation, depending on how "what I see" is defined.

A SET OF CONVICTIONS

A responsible journalist has to be in favor of more & better intellectuality if only because his work makes no sense unless public opinion has a common ground, a framework of ideas and standards within which fruitful debate can take place. Alfred North Whitehead expressed the responsibility this way:

"It is our duty. . .It is our business--as philosophers, students and practical men--to recreate a vision of the world including the elements of reverence and order, without which society lapses into riot."

To discharge his part of this responsibility, a journalist must work along two complementary lines:

1) An avid, ceaseless, sweating pursuit of facts, not as an editor--Gnostic or otherwise--imagines them to be, but as they are. This is primarily the business of the reporter.

2) Consideration of the reporter's facts and the relations between them in the light of other facts and of principles of experience. Without such consideration, the news makes no sense--to the journalist, to the intellectual or to the public. This judgment or adding up is primarily the business of an editor.

Thirty years ago, in its prospectus, TIME stated some "prejudices." On its 1953 anniversary, it can state some convictions, some compass bearings by which it considers the news:

P: That God's order in man's world includes a moral code, based upon man's unchanging nature and not subject to man's repeal, suspension or amendment.

P: That, as Supreme Court Justice Douglas said, "we are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being," and that American history cannot be understood or correct policy formed except with recognition of that fact. It follows that equality before the law is based on each man's dignity in God's sight; that political liberty is based on the soul's freedom to accept or reject the good; that legal equality and political freedom must be applied without discrimination of race or creed.

P: That those rights should be enforced, even in favor of those who oppose U.S. institutions, subject only to the state's duty to protect its authority. As Justice Jackson said, the Bill of Rights is not "a suicide pact."

P: That the opportunity for great progress, especially moral progress, lies before society.

P: That all attempts, revolutionary or reformist, of progress based on the idea that man is perfectible, will lead to stagnation at best and calamity, at worst.

P: That political progress means a politics based upon reality policy, skillfully pursued, may well lead to removing the (without the cynical connotation of Realpolitik); that such a Communist threat without total war.

P: That the American Proposition is still valid and wants restating in its deepest connection with the truths of spiritual freedom.

P: That the intellectual, whom society needs, must be 1) free to think, and 2) encouraged to press his conclusions on public opinion. That if the public acts on his views and they turn out to be wrong he should not be held accountable criminally. That he should, however, expect the public to hold him accountable and criticize him, perhaps bitterly, for his error. That an intellectual without enough nerve to accept this penalty should get out of the intellectual business.

P: That the same goes for a journalist.

On its birthday, TIME, the Weekly Newsmagazine, has journeyed back to the eggs of Western thought, in search of the truth that would explain the confusion about the news with which TIME deals. Truly, the demons of unreason abound today, and dreaming has led U.S. society into grave danger. No matter how good in origin U.S. institutions may be, they must, year after year, meet the test of reality in order to survive--and Gnostic dreaming cannot cope with the real threats to our society. As the Twi-speaking peoples of West Africa say: Se wotiri twa a, wo mo dae, which means "When the head is knocked off, that is the end of all dreaming."

* The New Science of Politics (University of Chicago) *This movement held that St. Francis of Assisi was Dux e Babylone of the new age. In the 14th century it inspired Cola di Rienzi to seize Rome. In the 1920s it sprang up again with a pamphlet comparing Mussolini and St. Francis. To stress this "similarity," the pamphlet included pictures of St. Francis talking to the birds and Il Duce stroking his lioness. *Moderate Gnostics divided, some cutting ties with Christianity, some continuing to work inside the churches. For instance, many Fabian Socialists, Gnostics whose dignity does not permit them to run after the bus to Utopia, remain within the Christian fold. *Thirty years ago, TIME's first cover was "Uncle Joe" Cannon. Speaker of the House of Representatives, symbol of practical politics. TIME's 25th anniversary issue cover was Niebuhr, symbol of renewed philosophical and religious vigor. On this, its 30th anniversary issue, TIME has the picture of Korea's Syngman Rhee, a practical politian enmeshed in a struggle that grows form philosophical confusion and error.

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