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Ascolon
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The more one writes, the more trembling, the more fearful his words become. Every utterance, twired in the rinds of the earth, seems extraordinarily new, like a flower that has never before been observed; but at the same time, because this little freshet of innovation seems incapable of finding its place in history, of interrupting the corrivation of ages, it transforms every utterance into something aimed against the writer. Irriguis hortis Valtevae est clara, Minervae muneribus, lympha, quae levis ore calet. [Gioanni Hercolani Epigrammata]
From whence his penetration? For to conquer time all that is needed of a man is that he possess conviction- to conquer space something much greater is demanded, something more revealing: supposition. Irriguis hortis Valtevae est clara, Minervae muneribus, lympha, quae levis ore calet. [Gioanni Hercolani Epigrammata]
With respect to lovers, there is no such thing devotion, only a stranglehold, a stranglehold that yearns to grow tired, for exhaustion.
- The reservance and the confidence with which you take the abyss into yourself is not your own, but that of the abyss.
salvo
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, uttering oracles, 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]
KEDOSUNE CHARITA
The diremption of sympathy and matrimony, between thymos and eros, which makes it possible to say, 'free and blessed are these vain little girls,' hypostatizes the historically achieved city of Adeimantus, - which knows neither thymos nor eros. This separation, even reduced to its due proportion, in comparison to the more stupendous intervals between loves, completes the disjecta membra of the critical philosophy. For in discovering this interval the dialectical content of thymos and eros is exposed, as an agape. Love teaches us this: In fact we hope that the remains of the departed will soon come to the light again out of the earth. And afterwards they become gods. [The Sentences of Pseudo-Phocyclides] This profound aphorism illuminates Benjamin's concept of a salvation not posited as the telos of world history, but as a sense of happiness generated out of the continued evocation of the voiceless tragedies within it, even as in Baptista Mantuanus love justifies the soul of bearing flesh and not the divine nature in being privated by it, Ludit amor sensus, oculos praestringit, & ausert libertatem animi, et mira nos fascinat arte credo aliquis daemon subiens praecordia flammam concitet, et raptam tollat de cardine mentem nec deus (ut perhibent) amor est, sed amor et error adde optatis nec spes erat ulla potiri quamuis illa meo miserata saureret amori monstraretque, suis oculis ac nutbius ignes.
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.
ετηος αντηροπου δαιμον
The happiness of man, insofar as he is man, consists in his reconciliation with destiny.
-- Heraclitus, Fragment 119.
1. The reservance and the confidence with which you take the abyss into yourself is not your own, but that of the abyss. The more one writes, the more trembling, the more fearful his words become. Every utterance, twired in the rhinds of the earth, seems extraordinarily new, like a flower that has never before been observed; but at the same time, because this little freshet of innovation seems incapable of finding its place in history, of interrupting the year of centuries, it transforms every utterance into something aimed against the writer. Irriguis hortis Valtevae est clara, Minervae muneribus, lympha, quae levis ore calet. [Gioanni Hercolani Epigrammata] Everything that Rachel findeth is vanity; everything that Cercropes find turneth into an Herculean ass: ante oculos horrendae mortis imago! Terrent mille neces: morte infoelicior ipsa est vita hominum liceat modo vitam dicere quando libertas comune bonum preciosus auro atque opibus Lydis Schithicis longeque Smaragdis pulchrius eripitur: varios tamen adde labores continuoseque simul: quosdam prope Tartara nigra: haerentesque locos Diti Stygiaeque paludi infatiatus amor lucri quoque dira cupido viscrea telluris miseros detrudit in ima unde Hecate grata praecinctum lampade Phoebu conspicere at frustra sublato lumine tentant. [Andronicus Tranquillus Parthenius in Dalmate ad Deum Contra Thurcas Oratio carmine Heroico]
2. One shall rarely feel himself moved to write if he ascribes his grand thoughts to his Muses, his merely useful thoughts to simple determination, and his most truthful thoughts to this necessity-- the self-condemnation of the writer.
3. The belief in something immortal within man is the error upon which life is necessarily founded: without it, man cannot so much as digest his food, much less think.
4. Therefor let thy speech be of yea! and of nay! and let these thine articulus vel stantis vel cadentis ecclesiae be, wherein consists the whole spirit of the laws and of the Republic, or of the social contract, under whatever names they have been given. Is Cherethites and Pelethites entirely unknown to you, my philosophers? Let there be no hymn, no lyre even! but golden hair and one of Thessaly's javelins for my muse. For yesterday the sadness of thy little Shechem was upon the floor of Zalmon alone; today there is sadness upon the whole of Zalmon, and thy little Shechem may rest secure!
5. To be always in a state of optimism, nor even to abide by that noble thought, sit Galatea tuae non aliena viae, can ever be that inspiration required of compassion, much less self-compassion. Compassion is peculiar to one who is conscious, not of sharing some particular misfortune with another; for compassion does not even require empathy, but for a moment having fallen from both grace and knowledge.
6. Here I stand amidst the frozen vegetation and the bleak air, of the north, who is named hopeless; whose air licks at the ears of my mule: from all sides it is howling, threatening, shrieking at me. Suddenly, as if born out of nothingness, there appears before me the great bear of the north, walking cautiously in the silence. What? Has all the halycon and contemplation of the world commenced here? Is my self-pity itself sitting in this quiet place- my self, completely released to the spirit of this north; my injured and shamed self, my second, therein immortalized self? Not yet to have died, but also to have never truly lived? As a testing, spiritlike, and intermediate being? As though I were that bear that moves over the pale north with its white coat, like an enormous moth into the sun! But what is the sun for it, when there is no such thing as 'warmth?'
7. The most effeminate thing ever thought about man is contained in that dictum: diversa ab illis virtute valemus, with which he first asserted himself over woman. Conversely, the greatest testament to the masculine ideal lies in the 'hoc pretium ob stultitiam fero' in which man might grasp the woman without crippling his virtue, so that he may even construct a woman out of the rib of his God. The woman, laden thereof with all the shortcomings, wounds, and folly of his masculine ideals may therefor be made a virtue-- antica fiamma, viz. the virtue of the expression of the masculine. In the latter, human nature is quite Greek, and has not even learned virtue, in the former it has entered into Christian decadence and senility.
8. For too long hath we stained the the vale of Enna in the thoughts of absconding with our own Proserpine! Conversely, a noble woman does not forgive as easily as her, that is, as easily as she loves, or rather, with an equally light heart. A woman will accept proofs and reasons with respect to her accusations as readily as she will accept seduction and elevation to the perspective of man. The genuine woman only accepts shame, for that is the only worthy excuse for her: that is why the man who understands woman should learn how to speak his understanding often in such a way as it sounds like shame, that should even be the most furtive of all serpents! Then he should speak to the woman's innocence! For innocence, though it is a glorious thing, cannot be admired: it is seduced too easily. We cannot love this lamb but, and this is the question, can we love the serpent?
9. The woman's pity singeth unto her solicitude, and she calls this her love; for though a man may bring her to tears with his confessions and emendicating for forgiveness, the law of her love is yet ardeat ipsa licet, tormentis gaudet amantis. To illicit genuine commiseration in a woman, this is an impossibility provided she has fallen in love with you. For she cannot say with the elegy of Propertius: invidiae fuimus: non me deus obruit? an quae lecta Prometheis dividit herba iugis? non sum ego qui fueram.
10. Yet, when a man loves, he must betray himself of his shortcomings, all his shame and weaknesses; that is to say, he must conquer in himself guilt, by taking a woman worthy of it. Is not wounded memory the mother of all playfulness and manly gaiety? Porna suis tantum, Memmi, substernit amicis. [Theodori Bezae Vezelii Poemata P. 41] But where love is wounded certainly grows there something better than gaiety.
11. Look at him, he is so remote; so fiery, and the heat playeth upon and danceth in his eyes so that for this very reason he seems as though he may be approaching.
12. It is not wise to pronounce things shallow or empty: for that is how we begin to love. Make no mistake, a dulce malum hides behind every charge of shallowness. And this holds especially true with regards to woman!
13. But more importantly have I discovered this: that a man's love, that is the profoundest humanity, because it testifies to and preserves the law of the sexes: all propriety, with respect to the manner of the sexes, is surely born out of this. Conversely, all impropriety and solecism is born from the woman's love. With it, enters flamboyance into man, the gloating over and parading of women, contestation of all kinds, etc. All of these defects are absent in the man that has had little experience with the love of women: this is not a coincidence.
14. Pity is her pax Cererem nutrim, solicitude her pacis alumna Ceres.
15. What is then the secret of thy meager happiness, woman? I find it expressed in the contention of Blesensis, facilius sustineantur; sic cor humanum necesse est igne charitatis accendi, ad hoc ut de facili sustineat tribulationes, that the disposition to doing good bolsters a good disposition.
16. Yet, when a man stands in the midst of his own beauty, in the midst of his own northern airs of taciturnity and reservation: in the midst of his own beauty, not the beauty of a woman's vanity and shortcoming; he is likely to see gliding past him silent, magical creatures whose happiness and seclusion he yearns for- his own mistakes, his own wounds, his own shortcomings: and that is no meager happiness. Yet, even with this yearning, man almost believes that his greater self lives there amongst the shortcomings, the humiliations, the injuries: in these quiet regions even the fiercest air, even the howling air, turns into deathly silence, and in the most remote northern regions, where you will find the white bear, youth itself even turns into a dream of youth.
17. What matter then, about thy yearning? Though yearnest not even enough for me; verily, the skin of thy-self pity is to hard that I may judge thy yearning, or rather or not thee possessest even any yearning.
18. The voice of the disappointed lover says: "I listened for a trembling, for a faultering note to remind me that this performance was indeed real- and I heard only beautiful music." For the voice of Anteros replies: "Now I shall love only the women who speaks to me with this music."
19. Cui respondit intuens rotae, volubilitatem in qua mox summa max ima funt, cogito de nostra fortuna. Infini enim animi est, hominis parum sibi constantis, qui perpetuum vitae tenorem somniet. [Edinus Cyriacus in Momos et artium liberalium mastygas] Yet no one any longer perishes of that serpent, prevarication and falsehood: the poets themselves, once the mothers of creticism, the inventors of falsehood, are now themselves falsehoods- and, in a word, have become antivenoms. Once they were filled with the deceit of a witting lavishness, as in the case of Homer: now their sure appointment is to convince one that the heavens and hells to which he has fallen warrant nothing less than the epicism with which he has convinced himself of their existence, victrix causa deis placuit sed victa Catoni.
20. What is a poet? A timid man who hides unfulfilled and inarticulate desires deep within his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh of mere foretaste passes through them, it acquires the sound of lovely music and the promise of satisfaction, enunciation, and vision in his audience. His fate is like that of Pandareos's daughter, the greenwood nightingale who, perched upon the deep foliage, cries out in the manifold strains of her voice, in mourning for her son Itylos; even as her mind is, like Penelope's, divided this way and that; or it may even be said of him, est consanguineae fragilis caro reddita terrae, spiritus unde prius venerat astra colit. [Ianus Pannonius in Sylva panegyrica ad Guarinum Veronensem, Epigrammata. P. 63] He exerts his beauty through his imperfections, his music most touching when it is timid and broken, for those who flock around him say: 'may you yet sing!' - that is, may new vagaries torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for your longings and your sufferings would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful: this tremendous lust in your soul for vision, though you may never share that vision, is solely what we honor in you- unspoken, untried, your virginity! The philosopher then says to him: "Succubet imperio veneris; se jussa retractat virgineae gravitatis honos. [Barlaeus Cynismus P. 110] Surely, it is from this tremendous desire in your soul that you derive your equally tremendous eloquence of desire and craving. Then may you use that eloquence to lift your audience above your works and lend them wings to rise to heights which they would otherwise never reach- it is because you have made them into seers and poets that they give you due admiration. They are so eager even to learn of what else might be clothed upon their bodies-- they are even eager, these people, to learn of what embarrasses them. The desire to be taught what embarrasses them is what makes them poets." Of course, a philosopher resembles a poet to a hair, except he does not have either that tremendous desire or tremendous eloquence of desire in his heart, and no music upon his lips.
21. Yet a longing for beauty abideth in me now, which speaketh in all the measure and cadences of beauty: this song shall I therefor name seduction. Depth am I: how I long for a luminary, that it might pierce into my effluence, even that I would dance unto seduction like the stream before the moon, whose timidity danceth unto seduction, and steppeth on the toes of temptation! Alas, why am I not full of light and like unto the sun? How joyfully would I then eat of the fruits of the dying year, and how babishly would I sup of the milk of this night, oh! how would I find ardor in silence like unto a nursling at breast! And even you would I bless, ye billowy clouds, who steal away the moon from me and become argent thereunto! Oh, how ye do remind me of myself: I am argent, and even I have put out the light of my own luminary, the woman! who is as aurum, that is too clumsy a temptation wherewith my timidity to dance unto! And certainly, even I live unto my own depths, and unto my own mirages in my depths: I approach these woman, these mirages, and lo! Ever back unto myself my timidity do I disprove; and oft have I dreamt that seducing must be more blessed than tempting.
22. What foul words are these: tanti tibi non sunt opaci omnis arent Tagi, quodque in mare volvitur aurum ut somno careas. Ye do not mean to execute, ye women, tota proles Eoli pugnaxque proles invicim, [Marcus Zuerius in Poemata P. 112] though until the man hath bowed his head? It is to you that the charge of pregnancy is placed? What of it? It is to us men, that the charge of the living is placed. What does man know of the pains of birthing, what does the woman know of the pains of living? Verily, the soul of a man is beautiful with the pains of life; the soul of a woman is beautiful with the pains of birth. And what is the most alien love to woman? The love of work: the love of writing, tilling, tending, etc the recedant vetera of life. Some of them garden... and that is only to remind themselves that there is such a thing as work!
23. What is the riddle of Orpheus's love? That love knows no trespass upon itself, just as Tasso's heart; and that error in the sense of a violation or defilement, as Orpheus's violation of his contract with Hades, is a precondition of love itself: nulla suos uxor melius iactabit amores: nam mori ut euridice bis bene nulla potest. et si forte mori cuiquam bis posse daretur: euridice fieri non tamen ulla velit. [Actius Sincerus Sannazaro in Epigrammata]
24. A thing is within me, I call it forgetting. It hath hitherto clung unto every sorrow of mine. For forgetting may be the most awkward memory but is yet the profoundest- forgetting that clingeth. For in every forgetting there is a stirring music of sorrow: dulcia surenum cantu magis, e quibus omnis pendula spes animae statque caditque meae. [Iosephi Scaligeri Poemata omnia, ex museio Petri Scriverii. P 279] And if it clingeth unto sorrow- there is the power of interpretation. Verily, forgetting that graspeth and stretcheth is the greatest interpreter of wisdom!
25. Forgetting is the greatest interpreter; forgetting interpreteth even self-pity. But self-pity is the deepest abyss. As deep as man looketh into self-love, so deep he looketh into self-pity.
26. Mundi theatris evehit: ac cedro aeternitatis facta tanto principe digna: [Alcaicum orosphonema] Vagary has made men of beasts: might not a heated nationalism, a noble resolve, a determination- be capable of makings beasts out of men?
27. The first excited nerve of sobriety only serves to deepen the state of intoxication. Whoever enjoys beauty escapes Adonis; whoever embraces lust falls under his power. The Adonis awaiting a person in lust, however, is a lesser god than the one that the relisher of beauty has fled. This Adonis is no longer at home in the vita activa; his dwelling is the world at large, totum spirant praecordia phoebum. [Cybeleius, Valentinus: Opusculum de Laudibus]
28. In the case of perfections, or genuine beauties, we are by a certain nature inclined to abstain from the vital impulse, and even the spirit of knowledge is treated with utter condescension: we rejoice in the present fact without any mind to the truth of perfections, beauties, to genius- taking them for granted, as 'the indestructibility of that highest life in all things. We nearly feel that an Alexander must one morning have gaily constructed a Persepolis out of the tremendous weights of stones: yet an artists knows, as well as any good Thais, that his work is 'perfected' only when it excites a belief in a miraculous suddenness, even as the splendor of Diana before the light of Phoebus: nonne rubent coeli radiis melioribus ignes, cum Phoebo graditur Phoebe comes? [Barlaeus in Cimbrica P. 8] Therefor he may assist this illusion and introduce these elements of drunken sleeplessness.
29. The record of our names is but the utterance and rumor, the illatabilem locum in which we walk, and is actually nothing but an indicant of the countersign which we hold within us -- vita privatus. [Hieroclis Alexandrini Commentarius in Aurea Carmina Pythagoream. P. 183-187] Thus, the salience of the passions, and of the curiosities of man, are audibly expanded into all of our social endeavors: such as our appropriation of the universal, and the application to ourselves of what is remote, and to contrariwise extend our personal experience over the whole of the human world, to portray everything as similar to ourselves and to spread our portrait over the whole of nature in veritas moralis. 7 L imagine communemente e chiamata quella parola, o figura, che fi colloca nel Luogo; accio ci rappresenti quello, di che ci uogliamo ricordare, E si come il Luogo e affomigliato alla carta; cosi l Imagine e corrispondente alla scittura distesa nella carta: [Filippo Gesualdo in Plutosophia P. 34] The passions are the effecteur privilegie de la memoire of the creature, without which the intuition of philosophical ideas is impossible - that is the final item in the musaeum of knowledge which had to transform the energeia of world-history into political entelecheia.
30. Why then should we with deep sighs lament the lost poetry of Solon, or the treatises of Aristotle; or deplore that conflagration of the Library of Alexandria? for if no young sparrow falls to Earth without God, then no monument of the ancient world has been lost to us that we should despair. Socrates! Might I take upon myself that conviction of your apologeomasis, that I may open the eyes of the reader, that perhaps he might see hosts of polities, and schemes of government ascend to the firmament of pure understanding, and hosts of moralities and philosophies descend to the depths of a mere perceptible sensibility, to be regarded as nothing more than archaism and superstition, - on a ladder which no man dreams, - whereon even the greatest of social Homers nods, and the dance of the Manhanaim or twin hosts of Reason, the kenosis of God and the perisseia of the Son, in the secret and vexing chronicle of their courtship and ravishing,- and the whole theogony of the Shulamite and muse, in the mythology of light and darkness.
31. The creation of the logos dikanikos however relates to the creation of humanity as charis to psalmistic poetry. Do even the characters of epic poetry lose their natural meaning, if they remind us, in the infinite drama of their combinations into arbitrary signs, of the Ideas, which if not in Heaven, are in the mind? Should one raise the whole justice and meritorious Areopagy of a Homer upon the corpse of his letter; in what faithlessness does the Spirit speak therein?
32. Day rangest unto Day, and one Night disclosest itself unto another. Even to the peirata technes and ends of the world this covenant is heard, whereof God revealed himself to the creature through the creature. Thus the unity of God is even mirrored in his works, in proof of a miracle of such infinite silence, that maketh God as nothing before the creation in igne igne vetat excitari, -- [Schottenius, Hermann: Colloqvia Philosophica, & consolatoria, ac exhortatoria] that one must in conscience deny his existence or be a beast; but at the same time of such immutability, that fulfills all in all, that one cannot flee from his ardent solicitude.
33. Our Philosophy would needs take another form, if one studied the fate of this word: Philosophy; by heads, races, and peoples, according to the bowery of the times, - not as a philosopher ones self, but as the painter who steps back, to admire their Olympian games. The Poet at the beginning of days is the same as the thief at the end of days; therefor Adam might have read verses unto Methusselah, and Methesselah unto Noah, who would sing unto the days of the Son of Man.
34. Whilst the world was early bad, and while the Earth before the seventh day were still a Chaos, the first sin was the most deplorable of any, and a Phrygian like Aesop taketh time to grow wise. Thus the youngest impieties were surely of the keenest dyestuff, and overwhelmed their memories with themselves; and, shutting up the first windows of Time, left no history of those longevous generations, where men might have been properly historians.
35. In thy self be substantially great, and in virtue more than thou appearest unto others, who, in their vice, have been deceived in Heaven. Think not thine own shadow longer than that of others, or before the seminal of your fathers. If you needs offereth a consolation before the length of Elihu, then do not fall short of the concern of Socrates. Look not for victuals in the Euxine Sea, nor for the majesty of hospitable waters; neither seek profundity in shallowness, nor great fortune in slight occasions. Though methinks Pygmalion would not have gotten his Phocensian victory, if he would have been given the patience of Diogenes who made orations unto statues, and taught to rely upon silent and dumb rememberances, rather then to foster hope in the characters of good things without rendering assuefactions unto them, and to preserve the intuitions which love had placed upon him. In every clime we are with Meroian shadows cast upon Antiscian states, and with our light cometh our shadows and darkness to walk beside us. Place not the expectation of great happiness or patient felicity here below, nor hope with Heaven to crown the Earth basileus; wherein our contentments stand upon the tops of pyramids, and the greater insecurity of their enjoyments abrupteth our serenitudes. Get thee an Arimaspus eye upon the characters of good things, nor lookest thee upon opprobrious affairs till thou overlookest them. Many are too early old, and before the date of their endedasmenae. Adversity lengtheneth our days, and Time makes no Atropos unto our sorrows; in the long habit of our living which cheateth us into the indispostion for dying, whereof we set to chew as upon mastic. Men live only by hyperbole and trope, and pass from one sleep unto another. But to learn from the story of Tiresias, who was blind upon the Earth, yet saw in his psyche or soul more than all the rest in Hell; that to die were better than to study the ways of death, were accomptable unto high virtue, and strictly the course of a Philosopher.
36. To dissect a body or an event down to it's first elements is to want to trap God's intenta intuito [Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters. P. 1145] or invisible being, his divinity, and very sui generis. If instinct must be as essential to the animals as will is for mankind, then perhaps instinct becomes an intuitionis obscuritate intuentur [Hugolinus Summaripa in Specimen totis systematis philosophici. ideologia caput quartum P. 133] and condition sine qua non of every animal, to elevate and promote the human being out of the sphere of the animals with all the more certainty to a higher order of creatures.
37. When Paul of Tarsus saith that the first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit, - or when Elohim prophesies, See! Adam hath become like unto us!; or as philosophy blusheth when Solomon testifies that all is vanity under the sun, and an old coxcomb whistles it after him; one sees that the same truths can be expressed in quite an opposite spirit. Human nature remains from the beginning to the end of days as much like the kingdom of God as leaven, indeed, the relation between the human being and God is as the grape to vinification; the body to the soul as leaven is to fermentation.
38. Sophocles and Euripides would not have become such great exemplars for the stage without the art for dissecting the human heart. Thus, as Meister Eckart says, that Man's heart is the labor of created things, not of god, - for God dwelleth not there - are we not left, in place of Spinoza's amor intellectus dei, the intellectual love of God, a practicum intellectus dei, or practical love of God? Letteth wise men's curiosity be roused by new stars, and letteth them to bring Myrrh and Frankincense, and their Gold! - for wisdom is apart from all things, and these are more worthful to us then their magic.
39. The analogy of the natural economies, of the plants and of the animals, is the only ladder to the anagogical knowledge of the trichotomia and spiritual economy, which quite probably alone may resolve and complete the phenomena and homines carnivori ex mutua caede vivebant of that visible and abbreviated half. [Antonii Genuensis: Disciplinarum metaphysicarum. P. 66] The philosophers have always given truth a diffarreation, amongst other heresiarchs in psychology, by separating what nature has joined together and vice versa, and in this fashion their Clements, Socinians, and Priscinians have emerged, all of which have tried to give an account of the soul by a solitary Entelecheia. Because the mystery of confarreation between such opposed natures as the outer and inner person, the protonema sarkos and anthropu kardias, is great; perhaps in order to attain a comprehensive idea of the fullness in the unity of our human being a recognition of several characteristic earthly markers is necessary. Therefor man's flesh is not just grass, but Man is a son of the field; and not just a Son of the Field, but King of the Fallowcrop, and sent to tending upon the herbages therein, and to separate the enemy weeds, - for what is a field lacking seeds, and what is a King without demesne and exchequer?
40. Neither the pietetistical thoroughness of the Pharisee, nor the luxuriance of Sadducean poets will renew the simplici intuitio of the Spirit, which in the 'Fear of God' impelled, in the whole teleology of moral action, the Holy people of God to speak and to write.
41. This is the compend of all Philosophy: pseude metamonia tamnoisai kulindont elpides, the heart tendeth to empty itself in traversing it's own wounds. I shall essay to have my Syon peace: the prayers of Saints can no way choose, but please. [Natures Embassie: Divine and Morall Satyres: Shepheards Tales, Both Parts ... By Richard Brathwaite]
42. Because light were the first born of creation, properly Paradise were but a daughter out of the Earth, and but a part in the fairest world; in high vanity do men admire the lustre of visible creations, when things truly glorious art not just invisible but exceeding in the depth of that sense, and Paradise were not just before our knowledge but also lost to our realization.
43. Adam, from the gleam in his own heart, realized in the hemisphere of his sex cognitio Dei naturalis insita, the character of Eve; who may be said to have completed that gender cognitio Dei naturalis aquisita, under the noble prospect of Wedlock. Without the sacrifice of his innocence, Adam would have not discovered that jewel and holiness of his chastity,- the entrance to which would remain impenetrable, as Cicero's reliquarum virtutum or unlived virtue. In what slumber, Adam, in what incense did you cry out in appropriation, and foolish, young enthusiasm, as you beheld that rib: 10 This is bone of my bone! All of the mystagogical rites of Hera therefore are glowering oneirocriticisms that are related to that deep sleep in which the first woman came into the world, that may be taken for an ingenious archtype for the mother of all the living. The catastrophe of Adam's entire way of thinking became the foundation of a sympathy 9 that was swiftly elevated to identity with its object in malum morale. [Aristotle, De Anima 9.432b5. - boulesis is elevated to identity with it's object in the reason.] Whilst all of the strengths of the masculine soul seemed to pass into him, meanwhile through the malum culpae or reciprocal action of the passions his soul breathed nothing but the childish voluptuousness of the woman.
44. Adam therefor belonged unto God; and God himself introduced this first-born and elder of our race as the supporter and heir of the Earth; as an image or even numismatical inscription, in which coins of gold or silver are as the lord of the land. Angels, longing to see the Lord's heavenly courtiery, were his first ministrants and priests, and even the first diplomats unto men. To the choragus of Sammael all the children of God rejoiced, whilst under the light of his morning-star all might see for themselves, the affablenss of the quite Cyclopean artisan, who reveled in his human children. We are still his race, the differentia lies only in the fact that our life is an anezetastos which lies concealed in Christ, and has been subjected to the vanity and mancipation of our transient system, that as it were, has been choked in the Domitianian flattery of the thirsting breast of a Tacitus, and silenced under the 'deumne hominem salutaret' of the Delphic Tripod. [Themistiou philosophou, tou kai Euphradous epiklēthontos. P. 84]
45. One cannot enjoy a lively friendship without sensuality, and a metaphysical love perhaps sins more coarsely against the conscience then an animal love does against the eye and supposed flesh -- male mortales odia immortalia vexant. [Chytraeus in the Silvarum]
46. What replaces the natural arrangement of verses in Homer, that without prescribed meter and in ignorance to the rules of art, which Aristotle thought up after him, seem yet to combine with themselves to work the wonders of an Epicurus's atoms, and what in the poetry of Milton amounts to conscientious fidelity; and dare I say Christian knowledge towards the veritable half of those critical laws, that in Shakespeare amounts to a marked transgression thereof? Genius! is the unanimous answer.
47. Let the EMAUR GDL and the EMAUR KTN of theory in the land of Shinar be lifted up beyond the Heavens and the Earth, and Jerusalem no longer shall be inhabited unto her own place, but Jerusalem even shall fall under the equinox of Babel. After God had grown weary of speaking to us in Philochoric epitomes; through the Cassandra of the Scriptures, and the Helenus of nature; through poets and seers of all sorts, and in reasonings and figures, and had grown short of breath -- did he call unto men for vespers, and spoke to us at last in the day's evening, in the Urim and Thummim of yesterday and today, even through the Son.What is the most incisive knowledge of our present days, without the pneumatic anakainon, which renews the past in a divine presentiment of what is to come?
48. If the Old Testament will not put upon itself the rubric of the New, then what Well of Egeria is this eternal petitio of our fine and good natured wits, who, drunk on the strong drink of their universal wisdom and virtutisque indole priscae 12 of brotherly love, have prattled out with Callimachian labor all the feeling of their Bible's justice into edicts and homilies which have served, nevertheless, but to commemorate the same quaestia concerning the outward perfection of rights, that, upon the inner imperfection of convictions and duties, has stifled the political experimentations of a Cain, and all the principles of a Nimrod, -- and damned his followers? Inability is no fault, as our Plato himself bears recognition; and it only becomes a fault through the will and its lack of resolution and conviction.
49. No hero and no poet, be he a prototype of a messiah or a prophet of Antiochus Epiphanes, lacks periods in his life where he can with good cause confess unto Job; my father too, is corruption, therefor the worm is my mother and my sister, and surely I am no man.
50. Though I were as eloquent as a Choricius, yet I might discontinue the present writing, that I might say unto you this and this only: Nature is like one of the Hebraic dicta, written in mater lectionis, -- herein the reason of the Law finds only her wheels and springs, which like the sons of Jerub-Baal, or the Biblic serpent, beg for their own Apocalypse.
51. Go into any congregation of Christians that you will; the language will betray their fatherland and genealogy, that they are heathen branches grafted δικαιοσυνην την εκ νομου onto a Jewish stem. The more edifying you are as a speaker, the easier will it be for you to accuse them of Lycaonian vanities; the more readily they will lift up their hands to receive from you palai lechthenta para theon dora, even after their God has withdrawn from them. Sagacity for the perpetuo divinandi curiositas is almost as necessary for reading the past as the future. I would rather study the anatomy of a Zopyrus, and take aims to dictate from an Alcibiades cachinnum the secrets of gnothi seuaton, then from a decadent lambskin accept the teachings of an ars poetica of fraternity.
52. It is with Reason, my philosophers, as with eyepieces, whereby the flaxen hair of a Charis is become nauseating; whereby the luxuriance of a Cleopatra is found for that it is, in all the vanity of her Orient's riches, -- whereby the most Epicurean of tastes is given unto a can of worms, and the most comely of relishes is become of quite vulgarity, -- whereby the most disciplined of aesthetic is become a blundering piece of work.
53. LO, hath I trampled upon the thistle in Lebanon, and been lifted up in my heart. Your life that is afforded to you, is what I am; thine arrabon is my aparche, -- namely, a breath. Do not think therefore that I should grovel before you, whine and beg to be preserved, or lament if I am all together banished from your writings. For, if I am to be made subject to your vanity, then I am to be silenced, and I will find peace: may I withdraw from you in honor like a prophet from the church. Yet, because the prophet liveth on behalf of the health of the church, and to ensure that it is not broken up, therefor in times of peace a Prophet must set upon himself. My preservation and my delivery are before your kerygma, -- are a concern for he that bears this Earth in the sworn edict: Till the Heavens and the Earth pass, not one jot shall pass away from the Law. Eye hath not seen, nor ear hath heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man. Herein is the only religion which is worthy of a supreme creature and befitting to him, and which GOD has prepared for them that love him: psittacus & corvi tandem prodibit ab ovo: sic nasci cygnos non nego posse nigros. [Plempius in Musae Emblematica.]
54. Yet I ask those who glory that they know God; how have you come upon this noble jawbone of beef? 13 In order to produce the knowledge of the supreme being, as you yourselves call it, on your little broken egg, you must hatch an adder; probably no more natural means is left to you for aquiring this knolwedge than for one of your brothers to travel to heaven, and descend again as Aeneas into the abyss of the dead; for God is not a God of the dead but of the living. You however, while you extend your hands towards golden branches, liveth in pleasure and are dead while yet that you live, and your true destiny is to press through to life only through death. In mortal felicity our severest oaths are perjury gainst' the blood, and burn like stalks or chaff upon it's fire.
55. Therefor bide not in the high strained antinomies of old philosophy, nor in the chriae of the hieratic, supported by naked reasonings; but labour in the ethics of faith, built upon heavenly assistance, and the happiness of credendums. For as a mother knoweth not of what nature is forming in her bowels, so do we have slight knowledge of what our destinies make of us; understand the laws, but do not in thy henotikon therefor swear upon the doctrine of a Cleanthes or an Aristippus. Do not satisfy thy moral in Homer, and overlook Sophocles and Seneca. Let not the Seven of Greece, but the one of Israel be thy Law: let Hereclitus be thy confessional, not thy texturary and final instructor, and learn the vanity of the world rather from Ecclesiasticus than Theognis. Evangelize thy love, and if you can, get thy self an Pauline affection. Give thy scorn from upon the Cross, be an Aurelius in thy faith, and sermonize thy philosophy.
56. Flesh and blood recognize no other God beside the universe, and the shema wherein they shew their faith, - hunger and fatigue.
57. It would not befit any Polyeidos, the greatest of Lycian sages, whom knew of how to tame the Pegasus; nor any Belshazzar, to whom the God of the Jews even had uttered monitions; it would befit only a moralist without shame or contrition, only a Nimrod, to cry out in the state of nature, "To me, and to me alone, appertains the right to decide whether, and for whose benefit, when, and under what conditions I am obliged to exercise beneficence." The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and his evangelical love, which may be said to extend even to auro turbidus, is the conclusion thereof.
58. The investigation of money and language is as profound and abstract as their use is universal. They stand in a closer relationship than one might suspect. The theory of one explains the theory of the other; as the statesmen for the rhetorician, and vice versa, in the Poetics; 14 they therefore appear to be derived from a common ground. The wealth of all human knowledge rests upon the eye of a Phorkyad, and as for Zephyrus, in the defense and command with, and in the mutual exchanges of words; 15 and it was a theologian of penetrating wit who pronounced theology sub ratione Dei, to be the grammar of a quite divine Aeneid. On the other hand, all the goods of political or social life take money as their ideal or nomisma, which even Solomon was said to have recognized. The recommendation of a new teologia mistica in politics and ethics gives wings, thought often times merely waxwings, to the name of an author; and though there nothing is to boot, between a Bean and a Satyrion root, 16 we should not be startled by the fact that a Varro, through his work on agriculture and etymology, has secured for himself the title of the most learned amongst the Romans.
59. Epictetus philosophized modesty, Poliziano grammatized it, Jesus moralized it, and the Carpocratians turned it into a phylacter.
60. According to that supervenient pattern in human affairs, in which on the whole nearly everything is contrary to ειναι μονον, - is foreign and paradoxical, - having faith seems harder then moving mountains. All colors of the fairest world pale if Light, the first born of creation, is exhausted. If the belly is your God, then the faith which is under the silence of your gaping mouth provokes the suspicion over death, - as an ignorance in the Will sub lege, though you are worthier yet than many sparrows; for the race of birds is brought up from a three fold advance from the stomach. [Selected works of Ephrem the Syrian. p. 165] Out of this ignorance the step from consciousness to guilt because too slight to merit distinction.
61. The moral, as Joash his arrow, cleaveth evenly, but falleth short. Zeno of Citium was the most vauntful man of his time, and more ambitious in refusing all honors, than Thamyris in rejecting none. The practices of men hold not an equal pace, yea, and often run counter to their theory: to respect the moral order, and to uphold it, are not the same; the former belongs to aesthetic, the latter to jurisprudence. - - virtutum autem pariunt ardua & illustria, et propria gulae vicisse. [Chylosophiae, p. 319.]
62. What is the opposite of Stoicism? - a question of conscience. The love of blindness, externa lenocina? Is there a loving breath even in sober Orcus? Whatever it may be, it is a sham; for it does not touch upon the finality of suffering: no past or future joy can erase pain now. Time, invented to this end, breaks apart the foundation of Jerusalem, and grinds it to already forgiven potsherds under Joshua.
63. If the Will wasn't naturally capable of being suborned to acts of sin, there is no merit, but only virtue; and without the sensible conviction to be good there is no ascription of any guilt, no recognition of good and evil itself. Consciousness, attentiveness, abstraction, and even the moral conscience seem to be for the most part a dunamis and energeia of our Will, which is not a causa sui but an ens ut causatum, is the Maximum and Minimum of our human nature. To the Will however belongs not only qualitas occulta and indeterminate powers, but also the Sanchuniathonic privilege, and demotic right, to contribute to one's destiny.
64. Pindar says, Goodness baffles the pomp of history. I should put this in the mouth of philosophers, that I may stifle their langage des halles. The historians are like the herds of Cacus, -- in searching out the origins of things these must travel backwards, and, leaving no trail to themselves, must inevitably think backwards.
65. In the temple of learning there is truly an idol, in likeness to Konrad's Helen, who's body is not seen by the eyes of men, on account of her sheer effluence; which bears under its image the inscription philosophical history; and which has not lacked for high priests and Laconisms. Should our history become mythology, this embrace of a lifeless beauty, who's love we may never know, and who without self interest worked wildez wunder of our experience, will evolve into a fable omni ex parte beatum; cui malum crevit unicum in omne malum [Mundi lapis lydius siue vanitas per veritate. P. 104] which bears similarities to the relics of Pygmalion's life. After an unimaginable length of years, in the language of our Bible, a creator of his people such as Adam will have to be understood as poetically a sculptor of his wife, or rather, so to speak, a commisioner thereof. Dead and unfruitful prosperity, for the Demetrius and Cresilas of our age! yet perhaps the vexing chronicle of Philosophy and the historical portraits thereof are deserving of less blame than the misuse which their lovers have made of them. A little visionary superstition on the part of the thinker, or for a woman to behold her future husband on the eve of Saint Agnes, would not merit merely indulgence, but rather something of this sort of leaven is quite necessary to encourage the Soul towards its fermentation.
66. Eisi moi ophthalmoi te kai ouata kai podes amphu kai noos en stethessi tetugmenos ouden aeike. -- Put thy heart unto reins, as Moses, and ask God to teach thee to count thy days, for this affords the spirit great liberty. It seems far more suitable for a God to govern his intentions in vacuam palpant onerosa mole metretam, [Beronici Georgarchontomachia] through our own Solomon and Saturn, and ignes fatui; and to rouse our Hyrcanus from his political slumber, then through such remote and costly machinery as the firmament seems to our foolish eyes. 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.
67. As it is for the Doctrine of Types, so is it for Minerva, in Lessing's venerable paradox for the painter: either the human being posesses instincts, and the pyschological theory serves only to reproduce in him the innerancy of an insect, in which case it may be said to abrupt the human leaven rather then to mundify it, or the human being does not possess instincts, and the psychological theory serves no more general purpose then to dehumanize him.
68. The Theban Plays would not have become such great exemplars for the stage if they had not made their author a master over the human heart. Socrates however surpassed both Sophocles and Euripides in wisdom, because in propagating further into self- knowledge he had discovered how to endure it. A man who is convinced that he knows nothing cannot, without giving himself the lie, have knowledge of his own good heart in potentia habitualis, but must play the Cocalus unto his eventualities. All these nods and detritus of the oldest history and pagan tradition confirm the observation that Joshua maintained against Shechem, that one shall be a witness unto himself in liberty owing before his God.
69. The metis of Odysseus and the daemonin of Socrates bear quite similarity; whether this daemonin of his was merely a ruling passion, a Daimona oicheion, [Olearius in Philosophica De Socratis Daemonio] or politcal cunning, I leave for the reader to decide for himself.
70. My dear Socrates, thou art the Julius Pollux of my heart, but I must tell thee, that the Oracle hath bade me to rub unto my empty stomach. For I must confess, I think of reason just as Saint Paul thinks of the Law and its vindication and academicism by the Church Fathers, I think it capable of nothing more then the knowledge of error. After you student Plato, ever have I chosen to gnaw at the marrowbone of human ethics, and I shall gnaw myself to death over it, possessed by the indecency of an apology. The state of mind it would require is contra to the peremptory duty of seeking self-knowledge. For I am living, and cannot myself take responcibility over my life, which is a catastrophe of such a higher order that an equation cannot be produced for it using the reins of this world. The very divinity that makes prognostications out of the wonders of nature sets apart the duties and the deeds of those called away to Sainthood. It is not the end alone, but the whole winding course of a Christian which is the masterpiece of the unknown genius who Heaven and Earth does and will acknowledge for the one and only creator.
71. A pursuit as sincere and Romantic as the Truth is not to be adorned with Historia Calamitatum in more geometrico: efficiency is already a distortion required by morality.
72. Come, do you not know by now, philosophers!, that there is no physical connection between cause and effect, means and intent, freedom and will, only a spiritual and ideal one, that is, blind faith, as the neo- Latinist, and greatest earthly chronicler of his country has proclaimed! -- deus antiqui promisit Nestoris annos, ut renet tecum Natus et ipse senex. [Anton Zingerle in Carmen, Aduentu Diu Caesaris Federici P. 6] 18 The merry attempt to hold the body and the soul together with balanos, as the learned commentator testifes, quoting Ovidius; not just with acorns, but also with chestnuts, even under the eylim or trees of ancient Palestine, was not an invention of the native autocthon, but only another example of God's providence. They had been born in deserts, and in cold mountains, yet had they no suspicion of the reign of famine, nor had they need to resolve through the cenobitic and inadvertent tutelage of their subjects upon a Carthusian diet. You philosophers, who will not simply permit your Bath-Quol to be answered in yes, yes! and no, no! the imagined or contrived paradise of Aristaenetian tolerance which you, malorum machinatrix facinorum, no more brazen then Martial's sulphuratae lippus institor mercis, have promised to your neophytes and odalisque, even as you have starved the horses behind the Anthus, is but a dream for Eutychus. Though your writer has no nymph of his own, and he knows of no Elysium or Arcades, wherein you poets and philosophers bless God at your pleasure, yet his infausta libido 19 blesses the arduous youth, and even the old dandy, -- not by account of his own pietism, but in a litany of childless mothers: "Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the LORD."
73. For he whom lacks the skin of his eyes, Plato lacks covers. Neither Chrysoloras nor Lascaris will work the miracle of showing you the bright day, if you have no seen it already; and no Petronius will work the miracle of breaking up your Alphean cloud, if you have not already devoted yourself to your beloved.
74. 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? What song the Syrens sang, were ostendit sermo mores animumque latentem or questions before philosophy.
75. By Aristaeus' extensive insight into physical things he knows 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.
76. 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 and euthynon polin 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.
77. Alas! daemonic Samaritan! for readers of an anagnostical taste there can be no epithet, no unclean wineskins! when we what faithless is do faithful hold, and what is faithful faithless, - ei tis pterôsas Kleokriton Kinêsiai, airoien aurai pelagian huper plaka. [Aristophanes, Frogs.] Caeterum nullam solidam nec eminentem effigiem sapientiae consectantur, with Petrus Cunaeus.
78. Now that Horace has completed his Laestrygonian amphora, in the typological ode to Maecenas, that one singing of the aged Bacchus in a wine jar, in which the man with whom God deals with in a sparing hand has been blessed, may that man take up finally his honor in human necessities, for one can certainly be a man without being an author.
79. 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.
80. 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?
81. The prince of this aeon makes the greatest evil-doers against themselves into his favorites; his court-jesters are the worst enemies of beautiful nature, who may have Naaman the Syrian as the belly's priest.
82. 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.
83. If one presupposes God as the origin of all actions in the great and in the small, or in heaven and on earth; then every numbered hair on our heads is just as divine as Behemoth and Leviathan, that were the beginning and the end of the ways of God. The spirit of the Principia of Moses extends itself therefor even upon the offenses of the human corpse. Consequently all is divine, and the implication of the New Testament, that we cannot walk to Paradise ex condigno, turns in the end to a play of words.
84. The fabled ugliness of Socrates had never such eclat as the aesthetic beauty of Aesop the younger. True, sunt geminae somni porta, one can be a man and dwell hopefully at the gate of ivory, without becoming a poet, or passing by the gate of horns for true dreams. Therefor do not venture into the metaphysics of the fine arts without being initiated into the orgies and Eleusinian mysteries.
85. 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? 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 resolve, man is as yet fallen, and bereft of the living God of Belshazzar's Wall.
86. 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. Thus much has become evident, even as Justus Lipsius affirms, in his Politica, that succession is in itself an obstacle to disorder: 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.
87. 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 memoria baptismi and Epimethian constitution.
88. This nature, human nature, is not obvious but concealed, -- is written upon the head like the mark of Cain, ex analogia veterum. 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.
89. Nature has taught Man the temperament of ancient Cain, inasmuch that She has also made him the true Aenesidemus.
90. 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.
91. 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?
92. 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. 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, cantus pernoctatis parasiti and disjecti membra poetae, [Urbanus Prebusinus in Oratio Moradacissima, P. 16] you desire to be called a prophet?
93. Satiare malis aegrumque dolorem libertate doma: reflection teaches us that our felicity and our very love belong unto the tola'ath and kikayon, children of the night; a lesson that Jonah, angry even unto death, had not been able to grasp, -- namely, that our very notion of happiness is thoroughly steeped in the experience which our time hereon earth has conferred upon us: illi in convivio Uraniam musam, huic Polymniam preficit. [Marsilio Ficino in Commentarium in Convivium Platonis de amore Marsilio Ficino]
94. The only kind of happiness which could arouse pride in us exists, however, in the women who might have trusted themselves to us, in the things we wished to have told the ones we love, in the tastes that we have enjoyed. In other words, true happiness is only the immature expression of a pride which is irremediably wrapped up in the notion of redemption.
95. A philosopher like Gnathena with her cistern sets monastic laws.
96. Though, never-minding the Amyntas, let us not complain that we have 'fallen out of our own youth' for it is not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself that is the ashery of historical knowledge. In the age of Cicero it appears as the Graeculi, as the avengers which complete the task of education in the name of the privileged Romans.
97. A chronicler who pipes upon arabicus tibicen, like the God of the Jews, content to make no distinctions between persons or between major and minor events, accounts for the following truth, -- nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, it is only a redeemed mankind that receives the fullness of its past, - which is to say, only in redemption has mankind been awakened to the βασιλειαν ξηαραδοξηεσαντεσ [Synesius in Anecdota Hemsterhusiana] of the past in all of its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a thesaurs omnium rerum - and that is the anullus mirabilist.
98. If the first utterance of psychology ordains the desire to see, does not the first utterance of Epicurean morality forgive the lust of the eyes?
99. Every creature of this world shall become echini spiritus retentio, [Apostolius Clavis Homerica] your sacrificial offering and your idol. Subjected against its will, but still in hope, it sighs under its servitude; it does its best to escape your vanity, and in your most ardent embraces, it longs for that freedom in which the animals honored Adam. Et quibus intentus fallebat tempora curis, mundus adhuc nondum cum fabricatus erat? [Lavrentii Beyerlinck .in Apophthegmata Christianorvm P. 188]
100. Without προβατυν ηθοσ, the liberty to be either good or evil, and inasmuch as a man’s needs betray him of his weakensses, there is no ascription of guilt or imputation of merit.
101. To produce the human race from a mire or slime, to master the many vain and effusive reliques of the Posidonian and Epicurean systems, it must be brought about that future man condescends velum Timantis from the mathematical spirit to our befuddled moral atmosphere, and stands before his fellow man with fearless eyes that could look upon the awful carcass of a Jezebel and with indignance that can even
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