A Head Start on Humanity
About ten miles from France's ultramodern atomic-energy center at Marcoule, and half a mile from the big Donzere-Mondragon electric power dam on the Rhone River, is a dilapidated farm that seems right out of the Middle Ages. The sprawling, tile-roofed stone house has neither hot water nor electricity. The men and women who inhabit it dress in monkish white costumes woven on their own looms, and advertise their faith by wearing wooden crosses on their breasts. They eat simple, vegetarian meals of food grown in the dry, sandy soil that they work with handmade tools. Five times a day they pause in their labor for prayers.
Medieval playacting? The dedicated "companions" who make up the Laboring Order of the Ark are convinced that their ascetic, antimodern life is the only way that the principles of the Sermon on the Mount can conscientiously be carried out. Oddly enough, the inspiration for this attitude does not come directly from Christ but from the patron saint of modern India, Mohandas Gandhi. "Nowhere have I encountered a political, social, economic and practical doctrine which in my opinion conforms more to Christ's teachings than Gandhi's," says Joseph Lanza del Vasto, 61, the white-bearded, mystical founder and patriarch of the Ark.
Six Years of Wandering. Lanza, often called "the Gandhi of Europe." is a Sicilian-born nobleman who can trace his family history to Emperors of the Holy
Roman Empire. He was raised a Roman Catholic, lost his faith while in his teens, and regained it at the age of 30, after he received a doctorate in philosophy from Pisa University. Lanza wandered through Europe and the Near East for six years as a self-styled vagabond, finally arriving in India in 1936. Gandhi accepted him as a disciple and nicknamed him Shantidas (servant of peace). Lanza spent 18 months studying with Gandhi, returned to France to marry and write poetry. "When one doesn't have an automobile, one gets interested in poetry," he says. Gandhi believed that India should reject industrial progress, with its dehumanizing labor-saving machinery, and make itself a nation of small, self-sufficient communities plying the simple trades of farm and field. Convinced that this was a plausible ideal for Christian countries, Lanza in 1954 organized a few like-minded friends into a community on a 100-acre farm that his wife's family owned near the Rhone River. Starting with three families, the Ark's community now has 63 followers. Within France, the movement has gained widespread, respectful attention; one of Lanza's books on his experiences with Gandhi has sold 300,000 copies. A record of medieval troubadour ballads sung by several of the companions won France's Grand Prix du Disque in 1959.
"Natural, Peaceful, Wise." Although all but one of Lanza's current companions are Roman Catholics, the Ark has no official connection with that church, and membership is open to anyone who believes in God. The 20 permanent adult members of the community have taken vows, and live under an oath of poverty. Husbands and wives live together, are primarily responsible for the education of their children. In imitation of Gandhi, the members of the community begin their day with yoga-like exercises, practice an ardent pacifism. They have joined in sitdown strikes at the Marcoule atomic-energy plant, demonstrated against the detention camps set up for F.L.N. supporters during the Algerian war.
Lanza knows that the Companions of the Ark are turning their backs on the times, but he believes that it is the times, and not the companions, that are out of joint. "The crowding together of masses of people in uninhabitable big cities will, sooner or later, provoke a return to the country," he says. "The survivors of cataclysms soon to come, caused by the hand of man, will oblige humanity to regroup itself for a simple, natural, peaceful and wise life. So we shall have had a head start on humanity."
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