protoithikologiafrom


	protoithikologiafrom
LeontoPeonto	At prius ignotum ferro quam scindimus aequor, ventos et varium caeli praediscere morem cura sit ac patrios cultusque habitusque locorum et quid quaeque ferat regio et quid quaeque recuset. - Georgics, Virgil. Job 8:8 - Can the papyrus grow up without a marsh? Can the rushes grow without water? While it is still green and not cut down, Yet it withers before any other plant. - Belidad, Job 8:8 labor omnia vicit improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas. - Virgil, Georgics. - - - - Man is the Spirit or ignotum tragicae genus 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 the telluris inutile pondus of his Heart, endured silently. 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, save in one's works and in one's deeds, yet there is no impuissance for which we cannot find consolation 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. 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? Wonder that the Poet is thus given to unconscionable exaggerations of speech, yet with an outward Stoicism by which to conduct himself? Thus if in this sudden bereavement, in this matter of Antheia the flower-goddess, is talked of as a real 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: 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 oxhide became the area of a city, and a plan more ample than dilatet Deus Japhetum, 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, that is to say, were magnified to be as a Leviathan unto Him. 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 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 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. Nature is a ξηαλανοτηαγου [Mutian an Urban in Zeitschrift des Vereins] or Aeolian harp which itemizes higher strings in us: the relation between Cause and Effect is not a real one, but rather a transcendental one. 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, and peer out from the Veil of Maya. 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 magico-demonic image of the world. Thus nothing is more attainable to the Intellect then the endless, /for herein sense is but the implement of die organoprojektion [Noire] or the language-tool which is but an applied mythos, and all of the momentary Gods belonging thereunto, are conceived of as daemons residing over the various aspects of Nature./ 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, shall I say, /with Meister Eckhart, an all-enduring scintilla or in ossibus ignes, /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 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. 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 the angulus contingentiæ sive contactus; a struggle against Custom, or even an effort to transcend convention, and to so become Transcendental? 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, He must look from ethos to tropos, [Aristotle] 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 symbolicum, 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. 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 consolations and constitutions. 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, 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. Behold, that for to depart of evil is understanding; ipsa rerum humanarum divinarumque regina sapientia pedem ubi poneret non habebat, with Petrus Cunaeus, and of the goodness of God no similitude may rest thereunto. 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, unlike 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.	080912
	...
Thetamatheia	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. bushels 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 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, Virtuosi and philosophers, 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. 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] In short, the conception and birth of thoughts; the Daimona oicheion or receptive conscience of Socrates, (for it could only tell him of what not to do) which we might call Grace; the participatory conscience, which is Faith, in comparison to which the Socratic conscience is no more valuable than a Genethlialogia and Astrologia, [Olearius in Philosophica De Socratis Daemonio] 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 grace 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. {Yet this sort of recollection makes the notion of an involuntary memory indistinguishable from an immediate memory, which is incoherent.} From a loam of Earth God made us in His own image, and that we therein dwell, in his Image, 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 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, which occurs between our protonema sarkos or 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. This immanence is the apocrypha into which our metaphysics is fatally thrust, though which necessarily draws us back into the mythology of Adam. 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.	080926
	...
Ascolo Parodites	ὅσσα τ' ἐν Δελφοι̂σιν ἀριστεύσατε ἠδὲ χόρτοις ἐν λέοντος, δηρίομαι πολέσιν περὶ πλήθει καλω̂ν, ὡς μὰν σαφὲς οὐκ ἂν εἰδείην λέγειν ποντια̂ν ψάφων ἀριθμόν. ἕπεται* δ' ἐν ἑκάστῳ μέτρον: νοη̂σαι* δὲ καιρὸς ἄριστος. - Pindar, Olympian Odes. πειρατα. - Solon. --------------------------------- AN EXHORTATION. Socrates! You bear your name, yet you require no proof of your existence; for you words were found, and they were eaten; 1 Sophists were bought in the wages of wickedness, but they were rebuked by you as though by Balaam's talking ass. 2 You get honor, but know ye not of fame; for you have neither concept nor sympathy thereof. 3 You find faith, but recognize no miracles. Neither are you a human, yet you must be an image of a man which superstition has made a god. Your ears they do not hear, your eyes they do not see. You surely know everything, and learn nothing; therefor your judgment is without understanding. Caution and diligence were the eyes of them came before you, and Delphi were not before the luck of astrologers. 4 But analogy was the soul of your reasoning, and the body of it,- irony. For because language is but the conveyance of knowledge, and you wear the characters of human ignorance and curiosity, therefor have you not rendered your body to the fire, and in judgment you speak before the tongue. 5 You expose in providence the diligent, you expose in indignation artifice, In Epimetheo hoc non erat, ut providendo adhiberet diligentiam, sed sera con sideratio & ut facti cum poeniteret, inerat. [Ioachimi Camerarii Libellus gnomologicus] 6 Blind pagans have recognized the invisibility that the human being shares with God. The covering of the body, the countenance of the head, the extremities of the arms are the illatabilem locum and visible habit in which we walk; but are actually nothing but an index of the secret which we hold within us -- vita privatus. [Hieroclis Alexandrini Commentarius in Aurea Carmina Pythagoream. P. 183-187] Thus, the importance and salience of the passions, and of the human interests, are visibly extended into all our activity: such as our propensity to appropriate what is universal, or remote, and apply it to ourselves, 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. [Compendium philosophiæ ad usum seminariorum, auctore Sti Sulpitii, page 23.] 7 1. Jeremiah 15:16 2. 2 Peter 2. 3. Timothy: But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. 4. Francesco Guicciardini, Maxims, How much luckier astrologers are than other men! By telling one truth among a hundred lies, they acquire the confidence of men, and there falsehoods are believed. Other men, by telling one lie among many true statements, lose the confidence of others, and no one believes them even when they speak the truth. 5. Francis Bacon, de augmentis scientarum, P. 188. If I have all faith so as I could remove mountains (there is power active), if I render my body to the fire (there is power passive), if I speak with the tongues of men and angels (there is knowledge, for language is but the conveyance of knowledge), all were nothing. 6. P. 221. In Epimetheo hoc non erat, ut providendo adhiberet diligentiam, sed sera con sideratio & ut facti cum poeniteret, inerat. 7. Veritas moralis, as opposed to veritas logica. For elucidation of the terminology... " Veritas logica seu cognitionis est conformitas cognitionis cum re cognita. Veritas moralis seu enuntiationis est sermonis conformitas cum cogitationibus quas sermo exprimit. Defrectus veritatis metaphysicae in aliquo ente nihil aliud est quam ejus impossibilitas; defectus veritatis logicae est error; et defectus veritatis moralis, medacium." ------------------------- 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, that 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. A man can only act or suffer by analogy to his own nature, therefor if an angel desires to work through our tongues in communicatio, it must condescend to us. 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.] Careful! The next age shall awake from it's stupor in the books of palling ancients, and the kolasis of history, to exult your Muse and give to her this message: your flesh is of my flesh, your bone is of my bone. 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 (which we might call Socratic 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. 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, 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] 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. A thirsting ambition for truth and virtue, a fury to conquer all lies and vice, which precisely are not recognized as such; this is the heroism of the philosopher, this the power of criticism which is the ability to recognize and to appropriate good and evil. Nature is given to us to open our eyes, History to open our ears; in the condescension of an angel, will not the divine plan become a mens auctoris? The sensible Eden is descended after the Light that is insensible; the senses do not exist merely to receive the world, they exist precisely because they receive the world. Thus the kat exochen of philosophy, as Bacon himself will affirm, is not abstraction but rather the middoth ha-adam of God's adumbration of human ethical qualities. One must conceive of Nature to enter into that History which transforms the Night of Egypt into the Day of Goschen. Though, the questioning into our similitude with God must finally result in a transcendental evaluation of our selves, that is of our finite and thinking selves, in a negative dialectics of the transcendence of the Soul over the animal nature, 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 conceived within the immanence of our Sin and Fall. 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. 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. Everything divine, however, is also human; for while a human can only act or suffer by analogy to his own nature, therefor the principle of our entire visible economy is endued in the sudden apprehension,- whereof one must be attentive in every human utterance to the idiomatum of human character, as the only vehicle for grasping the communicatio of spirits. The move from nature to history, thus subjected to the laws of aesthetic probability, suggests that the cause for the Fall of Adam was his development from a natural understanding to a greed for moral knowledge. [Mendelssohn, Bacon. Before History can serve the good Adam for a beau ideal of morality, it must be subjected to the laws of aesthetic probability.] This nature, human nature, is not obvious but concealed,- is written upon the head like the mark of Cain, ex analogia veterum. 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 Ueberlieferungsgeschichte or faculty for manipulating nature. 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: male mortales odia immortalia vexant, [Chytraeus in his Silvarum] that is to say, upon the image of a world after the fall of man, - the world as it is in God's marriage 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 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. 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 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. 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 disjecti membra poetae, or a cantus pernoctatis parasiti of verses; sperate deos, memores fandi atque nefandi. [Urbanus Prebusinus in Oratio Moradacissima, P. 16] 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.	081007
	...
Ascolo Parodites	It is certainly illuminating, that a hidden psychological impetus, once expressed, cannot be called repressed, even when it no longer wishes to demand an object which it does not obtain. 'Though rage befits a river, Tiber wait,' so goes Pedo Albinovanus's Consolation to Livia, as Mars continues in his praise of the simplicity of war, 'for country let the reason be revealed; what I could give, I gave, a victory gained- the workman dies, the workmanship remained.' Equally, the praise of womanly levity seems to ease the anxiety that what is fleeting for Eros, viz. the beautiful in its multiplicity of objects, will be again reunited in the theophany of Eros's daemonic infatuations, as an agape in the midst of eros. On the other hand, the analytic distinction between thymos and the hallucinatory satisfactions of Eros points in the direction of the difference between the spirit and undistorted expression. For the contemplation of love must learn to yield to the abandon: to receive love, in all it's frustrations and antinomies, without subjecting it to an order it essentially denies. Eros belongs to the realm of appearances, to the semblances of beauty apprised by a thymos, by a spiritedness which ultimately bears a man towards the beloved alone, and would like to bypass this latter, forma boni: formosa venus viz. through an agapic vision of the beloved: o curue in terras anime: celestium inanes quid iunat illecebris mentes involuuere carnis quid fuigitiua iuuant fallacis gaudia sensus quid fucatus honos quid adultera forma quod auro intertexta chlamis: quid cyclas choa, quid aule conditio attalice quid veri vera propinat forma boni: formosa venus. [Badius Ascensius Jodocus in Argentoratum P. 23] Love, in it's subjectivity, never seeks, however, to substitute itself through the semblances of beauty in an erotic fashion, as through a symptom, in place of the body of the beloved: phusichon me meton stergein philei eu men gao esches, tis epiplastou charis; eu s an amartes phusechu duschlera enegchen ouden to peplasmenon pleon. [Arsenios] Theoleptos of Philadelpheia in his monastic discourses says: "The perfection of virtue weaves a garment of love; love preserves the soul and bestows splendor and pleasure on it through the beauty of union with God. When love sees that the soul is stripped by the virtues of all worldly desire, it immediately enfolds the soul as with a garment." Eros, when it superordinates over the semblances of beauty, negates the reality of the beloved, and holds up to the beloved what therefor does not and cannot resemble it; invise divis Gorgoneum caput, quid machninaris tela Cyclopea, frustraque, ludis, & taducos ingeminas per inane bombos. [Nicolas Caussin in Felicitas] An aphorism in De Nugis Curialium reads, "This bride you once betrothed with the flower of your springtime; now, in your summer, she looks that you should bring forth grapes: do not in her despite marry another, lest in the time of vintage you bring forth wild grapes. I would not have you be the husband of Venus, but of Pallas."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 that 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 acceptance and the embrace of our earthly natures, even as in Baptista Mantuanus love justifies the mind of flesh and not the divine nature, 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. The obtrectation of social, political, and moral deductions in comparison with an infinite reason which echoes in philosophy, a reason which, as infinite, is at the same time undiscoverable by the ultimately finite subject, echoes in spite of its critical justification the De Reformatione of Zerbolt, "Homo quidam descendit de Ierusalem in Iercho." It is up philosophy to seek out the unity such as exists between sympathy and matrimony, friendship and allegiance, duties and rights, precisely in their contrast: in their political unity, viz. in marriage, in the social contract, in the categorical imperative. Praxis, as the power of a contemplation that is otherwise impotent, opposes in its being carried out what is already given, by simultaneously expressing it. The very capacity of praxis, which seals itself off from the realm of dead ends in an antiquated socio-politics, does so merely by investing itself to the unity of the given system; it does justice to the system of contemporary politics precisely by a moment of counter-pressure raised against the social pressures of an antiquated politics. The power of praxis is limited and, therefor, measured by the continued furrowing of the social and political system. Thereby, however, it is also limited by the dynamics of the older politics. Praxis, along with those very revolutions in which authorities are overcome, is the medium within which a critical politics is formed. The outdated socio-political categories are not merely an ideology imposing a limitation upon praxis; but at the same time they express its nature, the truth about it, its hope or hopelessness; and in the pressures created by those categories and in the counter-pressures raised upon them on the part of praxis itself are precipitated those in the remotest metaphysical experiences. Non omnes stertentes dormiunt: not all things dream lie silent. [Henricus Bebelius] My love for woman, as all of my loves - these are hopes; but what will you see in them when you have not experienced lust and rubato in your own heart? To turn women into streams - is that what you desire of me? Oh, if you are as yet a timid little stream, you have better look for your Alpheus first! My hands are an adulterer's hands, - too smoothly do I caress for cranes. And even more irresistible are my hands for all serpents and hermit crabs! My feet, they are a thief's feet-- upon them I carry away lovers from lovers, that they may excuse the adultery of my hands. My love, - that is a deep charlatanry. For my love can pronounce the innocence of cranes and lambs, but the innocence of serpents and lions, this innocence my love knows only to call 'heartlessness.' My Eros, -- even thy Seraph's ear hath a craving to hear wonders which everyone whose ear hath not been pierced with awl hears always around him. Yet thou canst not bear it when a fly desires to croon! Thy cherub's eye even desires to see miracles, as the courage of a lamb, though thou couldst not bear it! What couldst the courage of a lamb be for thee? but vanity. What couldst the chastity of a beetle be for thee? but indigence. What couldst the charity of a fig-tree be for thee? but exuberance, and a belly with wine over-full. Foolish Eros! Cast but thy pure Phorkyad's eye into the well of my love! How should the lutulence of that well thereby blind you? Verily, shall my own Phorkyad's eye laugh back to you with it's purity, for this is psuche pasa. Thy wormwood is too bitter a food for the impure to be fellow-partakers of! Yet knowest thou anything other than the courageous teeth of the impure; knowest thou other than their Hope, awful Eros? and therefor is thy wisdom emptiness and great vanity? Sweeter than thy wormwood is my Pride, the only true source of wealth and of wisdom! and the sweetness wherewith it is sweetened, that is Hope! To live--that is to bestrew, that is to thrash corn stalk; to live- -that is to burn oneself and yet to dwell in ashes, and freeze in time of winter seasons. Cypria damna fugas, si sua tela fugis. [Odilo Schreger in Studiosus jovialis, seu auxilia ad jocose & honeste discurrendum. P. 47.] Between 'I love' and 'I loved' lie the whole spoil of the heroes of the ages of the world.-- 'per sublimia cum feror, nec ullum do signu, reprimens in ore covem index perspicua serenitatis, purum nuntio solis orbe caellum.' [Lauterbach in Collegium Palthenianum Aenigmata] But which is given to truth? Art arose in the course of liberation from terrible nature, yet through art the utter subjugation of nature is impossible. Song, so to speak, is Tereus' revenge. No eye is truly acquainted with beauty, without being accompanied by the timber of indifference, and well-nigh contempt for everything to which the beautiful object bears no significance. And it is solely through infatuation, the unjust closure of the eye vis-a-vis the antagonism raised by 'everything which exists, that justice is done to what exists.' The eye which loses itself in something which is beautiful, is one of the Phorkyad. 'It rescues in the object something of the peacefulness of its day of creation,' which in the antagonism raised upon it by the universal is otherwise eclipsed in serendi modum partim casus, ut pleraque artes; partim aves docuere. [Celestino in Innocentia Vindicata] However if this prejudice is sublated by a consciousness of the universal imposed extraneously, if the beautiful is harried, and weighed up in appropriations, then the just view of the whole makes the universal injustice, which lies in subrogation and currency, its own. Such justice turns into the guarantor of Olympia upon Helena. Is not the tendency of philosophy to raise certain common place notions, as goodness or truth, above the practical into objects of unnecessary conviction also evident in, for example, literary theory or religious disputation? Verily, Linnaeus might dawn the name of Homer in Ceos. Yet this, the raising of the commonplace into objects of unnecessary conviction, -- this is precisely what ethics is not. Nothing is true in ethics save the trifling. Sex is perpetually above Hymenaeus; just as pain is perpetually above the moral. Aphrodite may bless all the earth, only not the Beautiful; for Aphrodite is the same as Seilenos. The nature of that to which we ascribe beauty, which may be extrapolated only by recourse to the universal, to the daily and lived experience in which it is presented to us, in all of its triviality, in which antagonism is wrought towards it, plays the role which one would like to ascribe to the continuity of feelings designated by the word 'infatuation.' A Cleopatra with the soul of Isis lives and works in the world. 'The foolishness of a youthful enthusiasm, by which a beautiful girl is made inaccessible, is not based upon any inhibition whatsoever, nor in too much coldness or in the cynicism of an overly repressed warmth, but because a relationship already exists between him and her, which excludes a new one, which excludes a relationship which embraces universality as the very essence of her beauty. The imminent awakening of the lover, Zariadres et Odatidis, [Ptolemaei Eordaei, Aristobuli Cassandrensis et Charetis Mytilenaei reliquiae] 'is poised, like the wooden horse of the Greeks, in his Troy of dreams. The admonition of dreams has always been mediated by word or image, thus its greater strength has already ebbed away, the strength with which it strikes us at the heart and compels us, 'though we scarcely know how, to act in accord with it.' This moment is the Geramantian plow, beneath which fate is to be turned. The greatest consolation in human nature is therefore, paradoxically, the smallest guarantee. What would righteousness be that was not measured by the immeasurable terror at what it is? Atalante's peril is become a wedding. To change a threatening future into a fulfilled now, - this is the work of a bodily presence of mind, a Prometheus Vinctus and labor omnia vicit, even as 'he to whom destiny speaks loudly has the right to speak yet more loudly to destiny. ' What, in fact, is man before his God? He is incapable of judging the nothingness from which he was born towards the infinite in Nature. Sebastianus Corradus speaks of this in terms of the poetic imagination of death "Nam de jure civili caute, de totius orbis & coeli regionibus, ac gentium moribus perite, de poetica divinitus, de philosophia sapienter, atque de religione pie respondebat. Quod si quis eum ut de rebus historiam, vel ad rhetoricam pertinentibus loqueretur, rogasset, id ille sic libenter, sic humaniter, sic ornate, sic copiose saciebat, ut vere Lydus, quod aiunt, in campum videretur esse provacatus." This 'Holy Hypochondria,' this anxiety of the creation belongs however to a fundamentally different world from the nothingness, from the mataiotes which it apprehends. The question of whether it comprehends that which it apprehends, cannot be regarded as a criterion of its value. Just as a mother is seen to begin to live in the fullness of her life only when the circle of her children, inspired by the feeling of her proximity, closes round her, so is the nothingness of the creation seen to be truly a concern for the living, only when the triumphs of the anxiety which it incites are gathered in spite of it. "Nunct vibi vera latent, scrutatus scrinia caecis e latebris vellit, quid verum semper idemque semper erit in falsum: nec corpus corpore plures tenditur in partes nec haren in maius harenam partibus excedit, nunc pessum figit acumen grammatice cuivus & vocum circuit apta foederamensus ubi gemium construction rectum transitione ligat, ficut contraria recto obliquum ration sine transitione maritat." [Archithrenius] When the God, that the saint receives and suffers, liberates the mystic world from the world of Ideas, he then again and again finds himself subjected to the ‘victorious powers of life’ and falls prey to that strong worldliness, whenever he calls out in search of his God 'non coerceri maximo, contineri tamen a minimo'. One of the most powerful sources of this symbolism flows from myth: in the superhuman type of the Redeemer, the hero represents mankind through his work on the starry sky. The primal words of the Orphic poem apply to him: it is his amalgmata -- his star-lit sky; his nyx, the one that is as changeable as the moon; his destiny, ineluctable like the seaward tethys. The saint is never abandoned by himself; he may always elevate himself as far beyond himself as he wishes. He alone may, upon the ladder of the law, fall upward as well as downward. The latter is prevented by ataraxia, the flexible spirit, the former by the weight that lies in the tranquil presence of mind. The capacity for the Saint to remain moral, that is, subject to the 'victorious powers of life,' requires both strict inner discipline and unscrupulous external action; in the words of Paulus Melissus, servata in isto celibatu virginitas mihi tum perennis. This practice brought to the world a Zaddik, a spiritual sovereignty matched in its ambiguity only by that fierce aspiration of the 'will to power.' Such a perfect conception of conduct on the part of the Zaddik awakens a mood of mourning in the creature stripped of all naive impulses. And it is precisely this mood which obtains to the paradoxical demand for saintliness on the part of the Zaddik. The disillusioned insight of the saint is just as a profound source of woe to him as it is for others, due to the use of which he can make of it at any time, as it is expressed in Gabriel Rollenhagius in the Musæo coelatorio Crispiani Passæi, "Esse pius cupis hunc saltem adspice quisuit oli tu quod es, et, quod eris, mox erit ipse, cinis." In this woe do we have the true Posidonian pathetikai kineseis. This quite simply figurative transformation of saintliness to the 'victorious powers of life' opens the point of departure for the unlimited compromise with the world which is characteristic of the Zaddik, his infinite mourning towards his peoples, and his forsaking the devekut. However, inspiration is probably the best tranquility and presence of mind for the saint, if it is authentic, clear, and strong. It is the spirit's bridle and spur. As poetic inspiration, ataraxia was a quieting force, akin to the Socratic virtue of sophrosune. Hence, even prophetic dream, as the hallmark of the inspired saint, is to be seen as descending from astromantic slumber in the temple of the ages, and not as sacred or even sublime inspiration. For all the wisdom of the saint is subject to the amalgmata; it is secured by immersion in the nyx of creaturely things, and it hears only of a destiny as ineluctable as the seaward tethys, and nothing of the voice of revelation. -- Numinibus gentes pulvinos sternere vanis sunt foliti, sed cur? ut bene forte cubent: en se deplumant Aquilae, pennasque saggitis Arctous curbo detrahit ungue LEO: his mollem PACI gaudent consternere lectum, candida sed perflant lilia odore thorum. Hinc Asmodaei valeat procul ira nefandi, ne porro thalami pignora turbet eris. [Triumphus Pacis Osnabruggensis Et Noribergensis : Heroico carmine ut plurimum adumbratus by Johann Ebermaier.] The saturnine nature is borne down into the depths of the Earth and, for the saint, the wisdom of a certain Triptolemus is preserved. For the saint the astromantic inspirations of mother Earth dawn from the night of contemplation tenebrosa substantia, [John Scottus Eriugena] as treasures from the very interior of the earth; the lightning-flash of intuition is unknown to him. What is the beautiful? Ut lyra Threiicio concessit carmina vati. [Operis Kluepfeliani De vita et scriptis Conradi Celtis Protucii ] The Thracian's promise of blindness. Though Grotius would attempt to present the tragedy of Christian man in the Greek style, and show that the Senecan tragedy is reducible to comedy in light of God's grace, it is neither in humor nor tragedy that beauty can be grasped verbally. Neither guilt nor innocence, neither nature nor the divine, can be strictly differentiated for beauty. The tears of emotion, in which the beautiful is veiled, are at the same time the genuine veil of beauty itself. For emotion is precisely that transition in which the semblance - the semblance of beauty as the semblance of akrasia - once again dawns sweetest before its vanishing, cur fertur falso cythaerea profundo quod sit amans semper sudore insperus amaro, .. haec rediens caeso Melyboeus cornua ceruo aeternum posuit tolerandi infigne laboris. [Pittorio in Pictorii Sacra Et Satyrica epigrammata] It is not that emotion which delights in itself, but only that severe emotion, that furore, in which the semblance of akrasia overcomes the beautiful semblance and with it, finally, itself. That lamentation, so full of tears: that is emotion. The mourning and pain of the Saturnine, as the tears that are shed for the continual decline of all life, form tired raptures; it is the life of the cicada, which, without food or drink, sings until it dies: domici sed talia reddit donci eterno maneat hoc carmine scriptu iam crucciam patulis. [Hieronymus Vallibus in Jesuida] A questionable insight begins to surface in virtues such as the capacity to vouchsafe and enjoy the beautiful, even in what is most mundane; this insight is, namely, the significance of what is nearest, what is inside and around us. Once, in the akrasia of an effluent subjective plenitiude, emotional indifference in relation to the choice of the beautiful object, as well as the willpower to avulse meaning from the whole family of experiences belonging to it, expressed the relation to the objective world itself, a relation which confronted the subject antagonistically, but with a certain kind of antagonism, namely, that one responsible for introducing shame, in the primitive, the pseudo-erotic and pre-christian guilt, and down to all of its fragments, as it were, draping the beautiful with that veil necessary to distinguish it from that merely daemonic infatuation with the body, or with the object itself. In a phase when the subject relinquishes before the alienated theosophy of things, its readiness to vouchsafe what is everywhere beautiful, opens the way towards Theognis's ainos and Aithon, a resignation of critical capacity as much as of the interpretive imagination inseparable from such, that imagination in which the transition of the semblance of beauty as the semblance of akrasia is played out, through emotional concern, through a gaster, on behalf of the beautiful object. The semblance of beauty and the semblances of akrasia, these are the two poles of the the erotic realm, and logos, through their illusory synthesis, generates the erotic impulse in which the genuine synthesis, that of life, is imitated. However, the speculation of this consciousness, which clings to both the beautiful object and the resignation of the beautiful under the universal, intimates nothing more than the alienation of a natural morte as mythos. The Saturnine's unfaithfulness towards man is matched by a fidelity for the continual decline of all life, in which he is absorbed into those objects of his contemplative devotion. In other words, all essential decisions in relation to man, by virtue of the fact that they involve akrasia, can offend against the saturnine fidelity: for these decisions are subject to the higher laws of morality, sed Apolline verior heis sum et loquor ante rata restifica ta fide. [Melodaesia: sive epulum Musaeum in quo praeter recens apparatas, lautiores iterum apponuntur quamplurimae de fugitivis olim Columbis Poeticis : et una eduntur ludi Juveniles Martinalia & Bacchanalia : cum productione Gynaecei] Faith is only completely appropriate to the relationship of the Zaddik to the world of nature. The latter knows no higher law, and faith knows no object to which it might belong more exclusively, that is to say without involving the akratic self, then nature. Georgius Macropedius used to speak of the irredeemability of things, that churlishness of nature, which in the end allows a little worm to survive in the fruits of saints; " Caulae gregum, pecudumque, stabula plean sunt, pascua laetisima, adeo ut amplius nil postules. Nam tanta copia fructuum est, ut in horreis tuis uel apothecis recondere nequeas." 1 This persistence which is expressed in saturnine fidelity, is born of its intention towards nature. This is how we should understand that recreance which is attributed to the Zaddik, and this is how we should interpret that completely isolated dialectical contrast, that 'faithfullness in innocence,' which Giacomo Leopardi ascribes to saturnine nature, "It is not good for the innocent to search into nature's secrets; and random suffering cancels all such unripened knowledge." The saint's infidelity reveals an unscrupulousness, which is in part a consciously Pentheusian gesture, but also a dismal and melancholy submission to a supposedly unfathomable order of baleful providentia, which assumes an almost material character: in the words of Janus Dousa Filius's Carmen, Tiresiam vatem privavit lumine Pallas, at mihi tu mentem omnem eripuisti animi majus habes quanto, lux o mea, Pallade numen? Lumina tu mentis, corporis illa rapit. The kingdom is indeed ultimately property, in the sense of the drama of fate, and it is endowed with a fate, to which the saint, as the augur of this fate, is the first, through the involvement of akrasia, to submit. His unfaithfulness to man is matched by a hopeless loyalty to the creaturely, and to the law of its life. Aegidius Assisiensis too, in one of his golden aphorisms, says "The eagle which flieth very high would not fly so high if it had one of the beams of St. Peter's Church tied to each wing." O caecam providentiam, o justas Heracliti lacrimas! [Conradus Mutianus Rufus in Der Briefwechsel. P. 242.] Thus there is great wealth and much wisdom in the fact that great shamefulness and much addling is there in hope: Pride itself createth wings, and findeth out that obscurity with fountain-divining powers! For Hope is the greatest cunning, cunning that createth; for in every hope is there valediction and brass. It is my favorite wickedness and art that my virtue cometh upon a crane's wings, and my hopes hath learned not to betray themselves through the children of my hopefulnesses, - loss and failure, shamefulness and addling!If my virtue is even the virtue of a barren mother; if my virtue toucheth my deepest shame and my most insolent beauty; if my wickedness is a hopeful wickedness, at home in nests of beetles and under the branches of fig-trees; - rather hath my pride taken these children of my hopefullnesses under its wing, and cared after them; nurtured and fed them even. Thrax erat, hic Thracum domitor - this is my virtue. Ethos anthropou daimon- this is my virtue. Verily, even as hope is the fame of thy pride, and even the wisest of thy men did not unto me appear very wise, so hath I found men's pride to be much less than the fame of it. Thus thou leapest repeatedly at hope, but beware of flying! for prohibited to thee is flight unto hope, lest pride discovereth the sourest grapes that hath not been tasted by man! and the bitterest apples too! Internae propter facinora commissa. -- What awful wisdom is this, my well-loved Horace?	090226
	...
tl	;dr	090227

what's it to you?	blather
who go	from