|
Protoith
|
Aliis, quia defit quod amant, aegre'st; tibi,
quia supereft, dolet.
Amore abundas, Antipho;
nam tua quidem, hercle, certo Vita haec expetenda optandaque est.
Satiety is the root of your complaint.
- Terence, Phormio.
Non ebur neque aureum
mea renidet in domo lacunar;
non trabes Hymettiae
premunt columnas ultima recisas
Africa, neque Attali
ignotus heres regiam occupaui,
nec Laconicas mihi
trahunt honestae purpuras clientae.
- Horace, Epodes.
-------------------
Rejoice in the flesh, you Virtuosi and Philosophers, which superordinates for what the Lord lacks in his own afflictions! Make use of this sleep which the Lord our God lets to fall upon you, to build from the rib of Endymion the latest edition of the human soul; to wrestle with the Idea of Natural History under the carnality which you cannot efface. For your animal nature lends hands, eye, and foot to your abstractions as well as to your hypothesis, and there are no faster inferences then the memoria baptismi of Images and Passions, - whilst in a vain contract send for Philological marbles, like the Poet sent for new-earth from over the ocean, that you may wake the next age from it's stupor in the books of palling ancients, and the kolasis of history. First came the Light, then thus the sensible Eden. Because a man can only act or suffer by analogy to his own nature, if an angel desires to work through our tongues in communicatio, it must condescend to us; then all such workings must, like the talking animals of Homer's Melampus, express themselves analogously to human nature, - virtutum autem pariunt ardua & illustria, et propria gulae vicisse and externa lenocinia, in idiomatum or peristaseis, that is, demonstratively and revelatorily. [Chylosophiae, p. 319.] One may observe for himself the manifestations of the passions everywhere in human society; as everything, no matter how remote, strikes upon the mind in a certain affect; as every individual sensation extends over the compass of all external objects, blowing up every laical situation into a public spectacle of heaven and earth, vacuam palpant onerosa mole metretam. [Beronici Georgarchontomachia] If the stomach is your God then even the hairs on your head are under it's Daimona oicheion (or receptive conscience, which we might call Grace) whilst even the colors of the fairest world pale when the first-born of creation is quenched. [Olearius in Philosophica De Socratis Daemonio] In short, the conception and birth of thoughts; the genethlialogia and astrologia of the ancients, the work and rest of the wise, lie in the fruitful womb of the passions buried before our senses. Man's godliness is not abdicated by his Sin for all denial is intelligible only in terms of some affirmation, - [axiom in Duns Scotus] Man must seek himself throughout creatures in Falling from the image of God, and by counter-example with them, come to acknowledge the natural world as a license to his own divinity; that is to say, the Body of Christ is itself to be recalled in Creation, wherein God has exposed himself to the creature through the creature. From a loam of Earth God made us in His own image, and that we therein dwell, we cannot now or ever be willed away; Creation is His kat exochen (external art) if one compares the Council and Deed, wherein the Father and Son are consubstantiated. Suspicion has been raised, that God be oriented to humanity, because humanity is too much like a child to orient itself to God; and therefor God has acted that it should be easier for us to put our faith in him, then it were to humanize him, and ourselves become Apollos. If one single truth rules like the sun, there is Justice; that is day. Foolish if you see in place of this single truth as many as the sands upon the shores of the sea, - or walk in the ascetic and visible habit ofthe Greeks, that were a mere prolepsis in moralis habita ratione, [Klippel in commentatio exhibens doctrinae Stoicorum ethicae atque Christianae] for the one garment of light [Psalms] surpasseth a whole host of suns in splendor. Speak that I may see you! This hope of Socrates was fulfilled in creation qua vult regulas practicas necessariae; veritatis observari a creatura. -- [Sebastianus Summa Theologiae Scotisticae] Our ancestors for seven days sat in silence of reflection or wonder nihil in robustam sapientia mentem sirenes omnes posse, [... Democritum me putate, & tacita saltem cachinni censura mollissimos pros -- Erycius in Comus, Phagesiposia Cimmeria] and opened their mouths merely to perform the office of the eyes and hand. [Entheticus Maior, part 46.] For as God happily clothed us in leaves, when the intuition of Posterity had taught us shame; yet he knew that as sinners we could not approach his image, no less in a sherd of Earthen pots. [Isaiah] Though if the possibility, however remote, of redemption in this life were wholly abjured, the human spirit would become a vis abdita quaedam, such that the creation of the mise-en-scene would relate to humanity as epic to dramatic poetry; the former though the Word, the latter through the Deed. If the passions are members of dishonor, do they cease to be the forerunners of the muse's affliction, and consequentially weapons of manhood, in dispossession over Athena's counsil? da che a noi la donna precorrendo le Muse era tornata per consiglio di Pallade. [Ugo Foscolo, Legrazie.] If so, then have you put out your own eyes with Epicurus; do you truss yourself with Stoicisms, and make aim to persuade the human race, under your pillar of salt, - that Nature herself is blind? All the most complicated knots of human nature are resolved in the acknowledgment of our relation to the invisible God. Though, because the notion of a Kantian synthesis presupposes a given in the thesis-antithesis, the questioning into our similitude with Him must finally result in a transcendental evaluation of our selves, that is of our finite and thinking selves, in a negative dialectics. Such a dialectics occurs between our animal nature and our Soul, to a merely ancillary extent, in the division of labor; though properly, if we are not to hold the beautiful fasces like a plaything, which must be said to take place within the immanence of our Sin and Fall. For excluding from Kant the Transcendental Aesthetic, we are left with logic as judgment or critique - as the unitary action of thought which produces the objects of cognition throughout space and time, not as intuitions of the cognition, but as logical and mathematical relations in the purity of thought; again, not in metaphysical terms, as in Aristotelian form and matter, but within the content of the unity of thought. The category of origin takes us back infinitesimally to judgment and therefor constitutes judgment as the unitary action of thought by which the self-consciousness of the EGO may be conceived of in it's essential unity. The self-consciousness of the EGO is immediately conditioned in the analysis of space as it is mediately conditioned in synthesis through time. Thus origin may be conceived of as the 'ground' of pure thought, and it need not be gone beyond. Man is the spirit wherein he worked: he is not what he hath done, he is that he hath became, - altera mana fert lapidem, altera panem ostendit. [Mor Ballagi] Under the tribulation of Time, with all spiritual destitutions belonging to it, has the Man-Prophet, in telluris inutile pondus, endured silently in his heart. The greatest misery is to be aware of your own weaknesses; (Unkraft) ever in our weaknesses lust counsels one thing, reason another; dossenus edacibus in parasitis, and there begins new reluctancy in men. Although of one's moral or spiritual strength there is no clear feeling whereof to be judged, yet there is no vacillation for which we cannot find solace in the thought- this be a part of my constitution, a part in the office of my relations to my fellow creatures, and thereof a part in mine anores Marathonomachoi: permit me to give thee no Love, Lord, if I love thee not, and endure my ignotum tragicae genus. A certain inarticulate Self-Consciousness dwells dimly within us, which only by our works can be articulated. Is the word Duty without meaning; is what we call Duty no divine messenger to be followed, but only a Law to be imposed out of Desire or Fear? Is it the happiness of an approving conscience? Will not David of Israel go to his child, but will the child of David not return to him, and thereof will David cease to fast in the eyes of the Lord? The Age of duty towards the law has only been given to the Age of disease out of the liver: in the Policraticus the individual is charged with the duty of judging his ruler, and the Fiorian Joachim had moved to unite the saeculum of the Man with the saeculum of the Spirit, yet he has, like all Wanderers hereto far, howled with question upon question into the Sibylline cave of Destiny, and been returned nothing but echos. That impossible mandate, Know Thyself, I translate into the partly possible one, quanto superiores simus, tanto nos geramus summissius, Work Not Against Thine Own Constitution. Nature has taught Man the temperment of ancient Cain, inasmuch that She has also made him the true Aenesidemus: Cain, properly speaking, teacheth the lesson that it is only with renunciation, that life may be said to begin saepe procelloso dat ventus turbine flatum: imbre tacet modico, fit tempus pacificatum, in the preliminary moral act. [Proverbia Rusticorum] Noble plowmen and blacksmiths have there been, ever from Cain and Tubal-cain downwards, but where does the Palladis Tamia of your accumulated Agricultural, Metallurgic, and other skills in economy lay warehoused? Of Man's activities and attainments the chief results are phenomenal, and preserved in Tradition only. Such are the forms of government, with those authorities they rest upon; so are his customs, and all the collection of his handicrafts, and the whole faculty for manipulating nature. The Germans said that Society was merely the Ueberlieferungsgeschichte. Society can be inferred but never beheld; it may be known solely by it's works, and of these must be passed down from Father to Son, and cannot be asked for or fixed under lock and key. Get thee Greek enough to understand: the end of Man is in vitae mortalis honorem and in Action, never Thought, though it were noble; be thou a worthy Aristaeus and pursue bees. He has riches who owns the Day with Deus, Dyaus, or Jupiter. Hast thou considered Earth, the middle-shrine, as Sophocles well names her? You fell suitors of Penelope seek to govern over Nature, to tie your hands in Stoicism and take her up into your own bondages; or rather do you seek to put out your eyes with Epicureanism, for because you dream up your own inspirations you desire to be called a prophet? The senses and the passions understand nothing but images. These first impressions of Light, - creation's Historian - were invested to the whole treasury of human knowledge. Like that solar eclipse which can be observed in a vessel full of water, Hope lies not in the affirmation of Memories but upon the the patefaction and Redemption of their impressions; that is to say, upon the image of a world after the fall of man, - the world as it is in marriage of God with Sin, and not as it was in it's nativity. Thus if in this sudden bereavement of Antheia and the flower-godessesses, is talked of a true Revelations and Dissolution in Nature, - in which light doubtless is partly appeared to the Poet - his own nature is nowise dissolved thereby, but rather is compressed closer. We are withheld, as by Anathema Maran-atha, by the God-given mandate Work thou in Well-doing, which lies written in Delphic characters upon our hearts, and urges us ever to, under persons, seek God without rest. Not so easily can the Old Adam, haunting us ante Vulcanum since our births, be dispossessed in sub Prometheo. Necessarily must Philosophy or the moral character, which has become pompous with Society, be informed of it's lack thereof. The Philosopher, who reaches up into his religiosity and his science like a Titan, must be reminded that he but goeth from the finite to the finite, that he must learn to become small, that he must die. Whilst the God-given mandate leaves us without rest, til it's Gospel be deciphered and obeyed, it must have competition with the living kerugma of our clay, namely, to eat and be filled. He that from Cupid's cup of nectar drinks, hath Love uneducated, which for itself competes. Equally, be it of small consequence to trample the Earth under thine two feet, as the Good Zeno taught thee, for thou art sadly engulfed upon the billows of Time, and burnt up in the pother of matter, awaiting to be extricated into the raptures of Eternity; yet to await in peace and love of the Earth, a greater then Zeno is needed. What song the Syrens sang, were ostendit sermo mores animumque latentem or questions before philosophy. Who shall speak or sing of Eternity and Silence, to which altars may yet be risen by Men? By Aristaeus' extensive insight into physical things, he knoweth better than he can remember, - that the wind blows where it will - though one still heareth it sighing, yet one still judges from whence it comes, and still more, whither it goes. If Necessity find a bottom in the uncomprehensive deeps of Plutus' gold, than it surely were the mother of invention: every individual Truth grows into the foundation of a plan, more miraculous than that ox-hide became the area of a city, and a plan more ample than dilatet Deus Japhetum, [Proverbia Salomonis] whereby the hemisphere, -et cognata iacent generis sub legibus astra - may be said to contain the tip of a point of view. We had borrowed the stallions of Euthyphron, and this is Man's transgression; namely, that he had presumed to come within the oracle of knowledge; and in consequence thereby, had inferred God to be at work in the great and in the small, in the Heavens and in the Earth; and in further consequence, that every creature were equally shared in the divine measure, for all things were given before the Judgment of God. For Lucifer had not presumed to come within the goodness of God, but his aim rather was in supremacy, - and he presumed only that he may be like unto the Highest, as in the authority of God's ministry. The Origin of Evil becomes at last no more than a political epigram, or scholastic chatter. Bacon writes an allegory in which Learning is compared to a lark which, at it's pleasure, may mount and sing to please only itself; yet Learning rather may take after the hawk if it should prefer, which can soar aloft and descend to strike upon it's prey: thus shall the observational mind condescend from it's spheres velum Timantis in mathematics to the little horizon in the Philosopher's moral atmosphere, whereafter the confusions of the Chinese and Egyptian horoscopes for the present form of our earth will be rectified as in that window of Momus, through which the angles and recesses of the human heart may be made out, and Fate and Providence be dispensed with. A healthy theanthropism were our orthodoxy, wherein we hold ourselves fast, as in Fiedler's Aphorismen aus dem Nachlass, to tie up the cape of this World. Do the elements of epic memory, (Gedachtinis) - that is, the disparate traditions which are shaped into poetry by the mythologizers, - lose their natural meaning, if they remind us, in the infinite combination of their arbitrary signs, of the carnal image of the palaios anthropos (Eingedenken)? The Areopagites of the neological persuasion will always find in the midst of gaps and lacks the ξηαλανοτηαγου of compensation, [Mutian an Urban in Zeitschrift des Vereins] and raise the whole meritorious justice of a Homer upon the corpse of his letter. Epic memory is the perisseia of the ecstasis which was the kolasis at the beginning of history. The highest gift we have received from Nature is life; let but Eternity, which is the spiritless being, look more or less visibly, through the Time-Figure (Zeitlichkeit) ! Then are men fit to unite there, for of this are all true works of art: wilt thou discern Eternity through Time, how certain Illiads, or generally how the Homeric epos, after three thousand years, yet find new significances with Man? If thou would plant everlastingly, then plant not into the old Tyconian civitas diabolis of ours, which divides the Dead from the Unborn, plant into the deep faculties and Religion of Man, plant into the basileian charadochesantes, [Synesius in Anecdota Hemsterhusiana] not into the healthy arithmetic and superficial understandings of Man. For another matter is it, if your symbol has intrinsic meaning rather than merely extrinsic; the Greek Herkules had no peremptory Duty, but a choice - and for the Greeks he was no balance of pleasures and pains, but a needs betraying weaknesses - but if thou wilst conceive of how far the human mind has carried a Symbol, then look upon Jesus of Nazareth, ecce homo. Ut pictura poesis; ut poesis historica. In Symbols does Fantasy play into the prose domain of sense, and therein become incorporated, inter Orei cancros adhaerere. In this uncritical phase of Philosophy, the Symbol is taken to be the very expression of reality, a daemonic image of the world. In this theoretical image of the world, no criticism of the Unpoesie of the astronomical nature, or of the senses has been undertaken. As yet the empire of the sky figures is not looked for under stones. Ever in the barest of existence there is a sheen, either of Love or of Madness, which gleams in from the circumambages of Eternity, and paints in it's own own hues our little holm and euthynon polin of Time. Since Death must be our Abelmizraim of Life, to be presently alive were to lay obscure in the chaos of Prae-ordination, and night of our fore-beings, nocturna Dei tempora sunt, atque diurna. [Scaliger's Epidorpides.] Time and Space are woven for us before birth itself, to clothe our tedious being for dwelling here; for because it is a tedious being that can un-wish itself, after the malcontent of Job, and it is by accustomation to living that we are indisposed to die. All minor illusions present themselves upon this our omnipresent canvas or, to borrow a term out of Palligenius Stellatus, inane amplum - of high vanity you will endeavor, while here on Earth, to cast them off; as Job, humored to have so far been, so as to be entitled to continuation, in a hidden state of life, and as it were incrimination, you will at best make Alcmenas nights out of adversity, to cast off by labor Space and Time in moments only, whereby to renew the senses of an hour. Custom is the greatest of Weavers, and weaveth air raiments for all the Spirits in the Universe; wherein, as under Hamman's "Polytheism in the Stars", they dwell visibly with us, even as kyriological servants, in our houses and in our workshops; yet their natures have, for the most, become forever hidden, are left but husks or even echini spiritus retentio. [Apostolius Clavis Homerica] Whilst the Poets bides tentative with these visible natures, whilst the Poet at the beginning of days is the same as the Thief at the end of days, the Volume of Nature remains closed unto him, and the Poet is left without God: then what were Philosophy but a struggle against Custom? If the Platonic school sought to ground the Eternal by means of the Transient, then it is the object of the Transcendental school, being that it has transcended the blind sphere of Custom, - of Space and Time - to ground the Soul by means of the Spirit, - to make the natural darkness and earthly nature of Man the bearers and interpreters of Man's Glory. [Constitution of the Church and State..] Our Life is compassed round with necessity, yet is lacking altogether in Ethica more geometrico demonstata: Man is pressed to learn that moral striving does not remain isolated to itself in Freedom and Voluntary Force; that he must cease to eat his own heart, following Tasso. Man must throw himself outwardly upon the NOT-ME, if he is to get any wholesomer nourishment. The whole of Humanity's achievement and chevisance is somewhat aerial and mystic, and preserved in Tradition only, which is the element of human life: Human Life ever publishes itself in thesaurus omnia rerum whilst, from an ever-fading past, men are still touched by the echos of a metaphysics of the ethical that we long ago given up to the realm of dreams. Hence the Ionian art reflects the Asiatic, and the Doric art reflects that of the Egyptians. If Man is considered, under the Stoic conception, to be a Dios Talanta unto himself, then the Society into which he lives, weaves, and is - is the transcendental Moira, to which he must depend, is fitted to manipulate, and therein becomes. Ever The Idea of Natural History, like a quivering fremitus, makes itself known to the Heroic Heart, just as the seeing eye of the earliest times seest into those of the latest. In the appearance of Tradition, the deciphered meaning is precisely the transcience thereof. So the spiritual man, as Capaso Formae, is surrounded and embraced by a living Communion of Saints as wide as the World itself, and as the History of the World. Religion shows us that there is in Man a demens genitricem occidis Orestes or internal confusion, that there is a man before and after the Fall: that the doctrine Know Thyself, in the Epictetian or Aurelian sense, is the recantation of Man. Though Man, as animal bougonia, infinitely surpasses Man; this doctrine is ineffectual in point of philosophical anthropology. Religion is not offered as a theoretical solution to the problem, though the incomprehensibility and darkness which it has been accused of will become it's highest praise, when it's true aim is considered. What this true aim relates is a Saturnine and obscure story, namely, the Sin and Fall of Man. The Sin of Man cannot be necessitated by any natural cause, and therefor cannot be articulated under the usual methods of philosophical investigation. Hence the interminable controversy of the Origin of Evil. Our Conviction, though it be taken out of the Poet in the Georgics, of a quite Protean Neptuno visum, is worthless, till it convert itself into Conduct, and Cyrenian praecepta : till a certainty of Experience be found, upon which speculation may revolve, man is as yet fallen, and bereft of the living God of Belshazzar's Wall. Man has ever expressed some philosophy of his Being in his Works and Conduct; he announces himself and his Gospel of Nature which, like the morning light, wakes up the statue of Memnon. Though, about the Grand course of Providence, man may know nothing, or almost nothing; for the final courses thereunto deal mysteriously with him, as out of Ephesians, - hyperballousan tes gnoseos agapen - Love, whereby Man is known by Man, and Men are made brothers, is mystery itself. Justus Lipsius affirms in his Politica, that succession is in itself an obstacle to disorder: thus much has become evident- Mankind is advancing somewhither; that all human things, as being construed in Time, and existing by virtue of Time, are given to Movement and Change, which tolerate him howsoever, like a yawning Gamaliel. In some provinces, as in the Economic and experimental sciences, this discovery has long since been talked about, yet in most others it is peculiar to these latter times. How, in former ages, by eternal Creeds, eternal Forms of Government and the like, has it been attempted, with destructive violence, to chain the Future under the Past. Man's task here below, the destiny of every individual man, is to be in turns Apprentice and Workman; or say rather, to be Scholar, Teacher, Discoverer: by nature he has strength for Learning and for Imitating, but also a strength for acting, for knowing on his own account. An Arabicus tibicen seems poured into Man's senses. Could you ever keep man a Scholar merely, so that he had nothing to discover, or even to exegetically correct; could you ever establish a System und Erkenntnisfreude or Theory of the Universe that were entire, unimprovable, and which need only be put to heart; then would Man, who properly is conceived on the basis of an ars inveniendi, be spiritually defunct, and the species which you call man would cease to exist. As Miasma is displaced by infectious disease, as Ptolemy's Almagest and Euclid's Elements have both been superseded; so does monarchy give place to democracy, and perfection of practice, like completeness of opinion, is ever approaching yet never arrived. To understand man, however, we must look beyond the individual and his activities or interests, and behold him at work with his fellows; partes Epimethei etiam ad Prometheum rite transferri possint, the lightning-spark of Thought, generated, or say rather heaven-kindled, in the solitary mind, however Prometheus-like, awakens it's express similitudes in another, and all minds begin to work together in Epimethian constitution. It is in Society that man first feels what he is, wherein he becomes what he can be, for properly he is only half alive on his own, and his only Faith, if faith it may be called which Faith is none, lies in Hunger. Yet through Society has an entirely new set of spiritual activities evolved within him. The duty of man to himself makes up the First Table of the Law merely: to this First Table is super-added a second, namely, the Duty of Man towards his neighbor, wherein Morality enters, or at least takes an altogether different form, in it's necessary application to political and economic science. Well might the Ancients make Silence a god; for it is the element of all divinity, of all transcendence; at once the origin of all Sadduceeisms and Phariseeisms, wherein at once the Manhanaim-dance of this World is ended. In the same sense, too, have Philosophers written of the kenosis of God, wherein there is such a miracle of infinite silence, that God is made to appear as nothing before Creation. [Golgotha and Scheblimini, Hamman.] Though, never-minding the Amyntas, let us not complain that we have 'fallen out of our own youth' for if Silence were made a God by the ancients, it is at least, for us moderns, a Government cornicular, or prothonotary. Thus in all Poetry, Religion, Art, Society, as one form passes into another, nothing is lost; it is but the superficial, as it were the body only, which like the mortal Shulamite grows obsolete and dies; under this lies a Muse which is immortal; a Soul which anew incarnates itself in fairer revelations. Hosts of polities, sciences, and schemes of government ascend to the pure firmament of Society, and those hosts of ethical theories, philosophies, and moralities which have been judged unworthy, descend upon the wide varieties of archaisms and superstition, all upon the ladder which no man dreams of, whereon even the Greatest of Social Homers nods. Not beams of Cedar, or roofs of Cypresses for my Shulamite; nor lyre, but a besom for my Muse, who is set to winnowing, and tending to the barn of Holy Literature! How then shall we devour death in the pots of Egypt, and the garniture thereof make tasty for the children of the prophets? Like the Poet Orpheus, who has anxiously cast his eyes upon Eurydice who walks behind him, only to see her vanish; thus are we with the ancients. Just as if our knowledge were a mere reminiscence, or ingenii omnium mortalium multum debilissimi, [Eumathia Ad Euopsiam Comparata] so are we ever referred back to the monuments of antiquity, to edify our minds with memory. Why continue to use the broken cistern of the Greeks, when we, like Aristaeus, may start upon the clear waters, and living wells? System of Nature! To the wisest of men, wide as their vision may be, Nature remains of quite Zodiacal depth, of quite indeterminate expansion; and all Experience thereof burdeneth itself to some few computations of centuries, and measures of square-miles. The course of Her phases, on this our little mole of a planet, is but partially known to us; as yet no one has a clue to what deeper courses upon which these depend, what infinitely larger Cycle of causes our little epicycle turns upon. Patriarchies and Dynasties are as the days of Man's sufferings: death and birth are the Hesperus and angelus, that summon mankind to sleep, and to raise refreshed for new advancement. Nature were but περισσεία or the kingdom of death in old aeons: in the Time-vesture of God, she hides Him from the foolish and reveals him to the wise. What the father was made, the son can make and enjoy; but He has also work of his own appointed him. Plato, who was but the Moses Atticus, or Philosophic Homer as Cassius Longinus calls him, had learned to see of what the Chaldees, or the Egyptias had seen, but there is also a fresh heaven-derived lex Rhodia in Plato, for he must mount to still higher vantage. Blind Necessity, which we call Fate, is the element running through entire nature. Properly, what we call Fate is that which interrupts the organizations of our Will; as Death, the needs of the body, etc. Fate overburdens the Prometheus Vinctus of man not with pain only but with injustice. If we are brute and barbarous then Fate takes on a brute and dreadful shape, if we are juvenile then Fate is our calenture and it seems that Avalon hath rolled upon the face of the waters: yet if we rise to spiritual culture the antagonism takes a spiritual form, hicne hominum casus lenire et demere Fatis. Though by what means shall we raise the extinct language of Nature, to read whereof the Depth saith it is not here, the Seas saith it is not with us, and Death saith that it hath heard only of the fame thereof? Alas! in thine own bougonia do thou exchange death for life, and are but returned the bees thou hadst lost, advanced no whither. Your steer will become alternatively your sacraficial offering and your idol, and behold thou has not sacraficed to the Gods, but to nothingness; caeterum nullam solidam nec eminentem effigiem sapientiae consectantur, with Petrus Cunaeus. Ei tis pterôsas Kleokriton Kinêsiai, airoien aurai pelagian huper plaka; when we what faithless is do faithful hold, and what is faithful faithless: [Aristophanes, Frogs.] The opinions of the philosophers are readings of nature, the precepts of the theologians are readings of scripture. The author is the greatest interpreter of his words; be thou the venerable Palamedes, whereof thou has recognized the living God to superintend and speak through creatures, through events, and through fire and smoke which comprise the holy language, inasmuch as Damascene's conceives of the Spirit and the Word. As Light resteth upon the darkness, as it's First Historian, so one day tells another, and one night makes known the other, who's call ranges over every climate, even to the ends of the World. Blame be where it may, outside us or in us: in Nature we have only a babel of verses; sperate deos, memores fandi atque nefandi. The Torch of Moses illuminates even the mental world, which has it's own Heaven and Earth, and an Imitable thunder in precedence of Virgil's Inimitable thunder: kruptos anthrupos te kardias (which Peter calls the mother of man) were but an Hieroglyphical Adam, wherein the whole history of the race is comprehended by a Symbolical Heaven, whilst the beauty and the Character of Eve is but an applied Economy, and lies in the very entrails, or kidneys of the Earth, and Eve herself makes use of our deep sleep to pluck from the rib of Endymion, to publish the new edition of the human soul. Ceaseless life, the Zoologia theogoniae, and progress are in Nature, but she is without anticipation. Quietude is inconceivable to her, and she laith a Golgotha unto those who rest, like Virgil's colonus. What seems only an endless transformation to man, to Nature is freedom. Of things contrary to Man's nature are still Nature; Original Sin, or the silliest of Augustinisms, hath a touch of her genius. Throughout Nature there is something impish, by which we are led ever onward. The human being can hold no faith to the observance of Nature, insofar as he conceives her to require, besides what has revealed itself to him as a cause, influences that have been hidden from him to bring forth her varieties: Modesty is an inevitable consequence of attentiveness to creation. [Sulzer in Allgemeine Theorie der schönen] Nature has always thought and always thinks; though not as a man, construing History from her own hopes and dreams, but as Nature. What the phenomena of the outer world conceals, is revealed to Man in the meditation of his own Spirit. The spectacle of Nature is always new, for humanity withers and grows sear, matures and flowers at the same time, with it's hands extended in gestures out of the dreams of men, as She renews her spectators. Life is her delicate invention, and Death is but her contrivance to get plenty of Life. All of Nature over there is but this one thing, this old Janus-Face, creator-creature, right-wrong, Nifl-Muspel. Yet, Man is the true Shechinah.
|
080927
|
