|
Ascolo Parodites
|
THE APOLOGOUMENA
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.
οἵτινες ἐνδείκνυνται τὸ ἔργον τοῦ νόμου γραπτὸν ἐν ταῖς καρδίαις αὐτῶν,
συνμαρτυρούσης αὐτῶν τῆς συνειδήσεως καὶ μεταξὺ ἀλλήλων τῶν λογισμῶν κατηγορούντων ἢ καὶ ἀπολογουμένων
- Romans 2:15.
---------------------------------
Everything that Rachel findeth is vanity; everything that wise men find turneth to Myrrh, Frankincense, and to Gold. Therefor let thy speech be of yea! and of nay! and let these thine articulus vel stantis vel cadentis ecclesiae be, wherein consists the whole spirit of the laws and of the Republic, or of the social contract, under whatever names they have been given; -- for all else is of the Devil, who condoneth judgment. The Diana's tree of a thearchy is mirrored in the shards of Jerusalem, and in that shattered vessel, like the sun, in droplets on the grass, that tarrieth not for man, nor waiteth for the sons of men. For yesterday the dew of the Lord was upon the fleece of Gideon alone, and it was dry upon the whole earth; today, dew upon the whole earth, and dryness upon the fleece alone; -- therefor learneth thou to set thy bough of unhappiness unto fire, and to transplant the unhappiness of thy Shechem into thy little Zalmon. No chisel, no lyre even! but golden hair and one of Thessaly's javelins for my muse! 17 A deeper sleep was our most ancient ancestor's rest; and their ceremony, - a Phaeacian dance upon the Anapaulai. Seven days sat they in silence of wonder or apology, before the twin cherubim were sent down as guardians over the Kapporeth. What is more certain than the end of man, and of what other truth then sin is there a more general and better attested knowledge? Nevertheless there is no man wise enough to believe it except the one who, as in the prayer of Moses, is taught by God to number his own days. 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. 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 baptism; do you speak before the tongue, having not rendered your tongue unto judgment. 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. 8 The covering of the body, the countenance of the head, the extremities of the arms are the visible habit and illatabilem locum 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. 7 Human passions are the predictable driving mechanism of the creature - that is the final item in the inventory of knowledge which had to transform the dynamism of world-history into political action. Why then should we with deep sighs lament the lost poetry of Solon, or the treatises of Aristotle; or deplore that conflagration of the Library of Alexandria? for if no young sparrow falls to Earth without God, then no monument of the ancient world has been lost to us that we should despair. Socrates! Might I take upon myself that conviction of your apologeomasis, that I may open the eyes of the reader, that perhaps he might see hosts of polities, and schemes of government ascend to the firmament of pure understanding, and hosts of moralities and philosophies descend to the depths of a mere perceptible sensibility, to be regarded as nothing more than archaism and superstition, - on a ladder which no man dreams, - whereon even the greatest of social Homers nods, and the dance of the Manhanaim or twin hosts of Reason, the kenosis of God and the perisseia of the Son, in the secret and vexing chronicle of their courtship and ravishing,- and the whole theogony of the Shulamite and muse, in the mythology of light and darkness. Mose's little flame in the Pentateuch illuminates even our mental world, which has its Heaven and Earth. The creation of the logos dikanikos however relates to the creation of humanity as charis to psalmistic poetry. Lord! Still the storm in my heart to a whisper! Behold the image in which you are created with the beauty of the human creature; give praise unto God for the deed, whereof God made us from a loam of the Earth, and compare the beauty of the world with the deed of the creator; -- worship with the psalmist in the heart which cannot fail in strength. Do the characters of epic poetry lose their natural meaning, if they remind us, in the infinite drama of their combinations into arbitrary signs, of the Ideas, which if not in Heaven, are in the mind? Should one raise the whole justice and meritorious Areopagy of a Homer upon the corpse of his letter; in what faithlessness does the Spirit speak therein? Day rangest unto Day, and one Night disclosest itself unto another. Even to the peirata technes and ends of the world this covenant is heard, whereof God revealed himself to the creature through the creature. Thus the unity of God is even mirrored in his works, in proof of a miracle of such infinite silence, that maketh God as nothing before the creation in igne igne vetat excitari, -- [Schottenius, Hermann: Colloqvia Philosophica, & consolatoria, ac exhortatoria] that one must in conscience deny his existence or be a beast; but at the same time of such immutability, that fulfills all in all, that one cannot flee from his ardent solicitude. Our Philosophy would needs take another form, if one studied the fate of this word: Philosophy; by heads, races, and peoples, according to the bowery of the times, - not as a philosopher ones self, but as the painter who steps back, to admire their Olympian games. The Poet at the beginning of days is the same as the thief at the end of days; therefor Adam might have read verses unto Methusselah, and Methesselah unto Noah, who would sing unto the days of the Son of Man. Whilst the world was early bad, and while the Earth before the seventh day were still a Chaos, the first sin was the most deplorable of any, and a Phrygian like Aesop taketh time to grow wise. Thus the youngest impieties were surely of the keenest dyestuff, and overwhelmed their memories with themselves; and, shutting up the first windows of Time, left no history of those longevous generations, where men might have been properly historians. The Love of the Spirit sinneth against the conscience methinks as much as the animal love does against the eye and the supposed flesh. In thy self be substantially great, and in virtue more than thou appearest unto others, who, in their vice, have been deceived in Heaven. Think not thine own shadow longer than that of others, or before the seminal of your fathers; nor delight to take the apogeum of thyself. If you needs offereth a consolation before the length of Elihu, then do not fall short of the concern of Socrates. Look not for victuals in the Euxine Sea, nor for the majesty of hospitable waters; neither seek profundity in shallowness, nor great fortune in slight occasions. Though methinks Pygmalion would not have gotten his Phocensian victory, if he would have been given the patience of Diogenes who made orations unto statues, and taught to rely upon silent and dumb rememberances, rather then to foster hope in the characters of good things without rendering assuefactions unto them, and to preserve the intuitions which love had placed upon him. In every clime we are with Meroian shadows cast upon Antiscian states, and with our light cometh our shadows and darkness to walk beside us. Place not the expectation of great happiness or patient felicity here below, nor hope with Heaven to crown the Earth basileus; wherein our contentments stand upon the tops of pyramids, and the greater insecurity of their enjoyments abrupteth our serenitudes. Get thee an Arimaspus eye upon the characters of good things, nor lookest thee upon opprobrious affairs till thou overlookest them. Many are too early old, and before the date of their endedasmenae. Adversity lengtheneth our days, and Time makes no Atropos unto our sorrows; in the long habit of our living which cheateth us into the indispostion for dying, whereof we set to chew as upon mastic. Men live only by hyperbole and trope, and pass from one sleep unto another. But to learn from the story of Tiresias, who was blind upon the Earth, yet saw in his psyche or soul more than all the rest in Hell; that to die were better than to study the ways of death, were accomptable unto high virtue, and strictly the course of a Philosopher. To dissect a body or an event down to it's first elements is to want to trap God's intenta intuito [Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters. P. 1145] or invisible being, his divinity, and very sui generis. If instinct must be as essential to the animals as genius is for men, then perhaps instinct becomes an intuitionis obscuritate intuentur [Hugolinus Summaripa in Specimen totis systematis philosophici. ideologia caput quartum P. 133] and condition sine qua non of every animal, to elevate and promote the human being out of the sphere of the animals with all the more certainty to a higher order of creatures, different in kind and not in degree. When Paul of Tarsus saith that the first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit, - or when Elohim prophesies, See! Adam hath become like unto us!; or as philosophy blusheth when Solomon testifies that all is vanity under the sun, and an old coxcomb whistles it after him; one sees that the same truths can be expressed in quite an opposite spirit, that is, an ethical one. Human nature remains from the beginning to the end of days as much like the kingdom of God as leaven, indeed, the relation between the human being and God is as the grape to vinification; the body to the soul as leaven is to fermentation. Sophocles and Euripides would not have become such great exemplars for the stage without the art for dissecting the human heart which was the prothumia of a creature in Sin that was the apocatastasis of the animal's hysteron. Thus, as Meister Eckart says, that Man's heart is the labor of created things, not of god, - for God dwelleth not there - are we not left, in place of Spinoza's amor intellectus dei, the intellectual love of God, a practicum intellectus dei, or practical love of God? Letteth wise men's curiosity be roused by new stars, and letteth them to bring Myrrh and Frankincense, and their Gold! - for wisdom is apart from all things, and these are more worthful to us then their magic. The analogy of the natural economies, of the plants and of the animals, is the only ladder to the anagogical knowledge of the trichotomia and spiritual economy, which quite probably alone may resolve and complete the phenomena and homines carnivori ex mutua caede vivebant of that visible and abbreviated half. [Antonii Genuensis: Disciplinarum metaphysicarum. P. 66] The philosophers have always given truth a diffarreation, amongst other heresiarchs in psychology, by separating what nature has joined together and vice versa, and in this fashion their Clements, Socinians, and Priscinians have emerged, all of which have tried to give an account of the soul by a solitary Entelecheia. Because the mystery of confarreation between such opposed natures as the outer and inner person, the protonema sarkos and anthropu kardias, is great; perhaps in order to attain a comprehensive idea of the fullness in the unity of our human being a recognition of several characteristic earthly markers is necessary. Therefor man's flesh is not just grass, but Man is a son of the field; and not just a Son of the Field, but King of the Fallowcrop, and sent to tending upon the herbages therein, and to separate the enemy weeds, - for what is a field lacking seeds, and what is a King without demesne and exchequer? Oh God! That you hold our Soul in life, and but that we are as a woman in childbirth, and suffer her pains though we are children in wisdom! Come down upon us, that the Heathen anointed in pride may be despised as fantasies are, who, wearing pride for his necklace questioneth however God may posses wisdom, even whilst he useth thine name; who, with his mouth laying claim to Heaven, with his tongue taketh possession over the Earth! whilst even before your pronouncement the mountains flee; before the God who's judgment causeth the lands to grow still and all to be quiet. Allow the heathen's muse to snort in vain against children, and childish doctrines in philosophy; but do not allow Rachel to be jealous in vain! Neither the pietetistical thoroughness of the Pharisee, nor the luxuriance of Sadducean poets will renew the simplici intuitio of the Spirit, which in the 'Fear of God' impelled, in the whole teleology of moral action, the Holy people of God to speak and to write. This is the compend of all Philosophy: pseude metamonia tamnoisai kulindont elpides, the heart tendeth to empty itself in traversing it's own wounds. I shall essay to have my Syon peace: the prayers of Saints can no way choose, but please. [Natures Embassie: Divine and Morall Satyres: Shepheards Tales, Both Parts ... By Richard Brathwaite] Because light were the first born of creation, properly Paradise were but a daughter out of the Earth, and but a part in the fairest world; in high vanity do men admire the lustre of visible creations, when things truly glorious art not just invisible but exceeding in the depth of that sense, and Paradise were not just before our knowledge but also lost to our realization. Adam, from the gleam in his own heart, realized in the hemisphere of his sex cognitio Dei naturalis insita, the character of Eve; who may be said to have completed that gender cognitio Dei naturalis aquisita, under the noble prospect of Wedlock. Without the sacrifice of his innocence, Adam would have not discovered that jewel and holiness of his chastity,- the entrance to which would remain impenetrable, as Cicero's reliquarum virtutum or unlived virtue. In what slumber, Adam, in what incense did you cry out in appropriation, and foolish, young enthusiasm, as you beheld that rib: 10 This is bone of my bone! All of the mystagogical rites of Hera therefore are glowering oneirocriticisms that are related to that deep sleep in which the first woman came into the world, that may be taken for an ingenious archtype for the mother of all the living. The catastrophe of Adam's entire way of thinking became the foundation of a sympathy 9 that was swiftly elevated to identity with its object in malum morale. [Aristotle, De Anima 9.432b5. - boulesis is elevated to identity with it's object in the reason.] Whilst all of the strengths of the masculine soul seemed to pass into him, meanwhile through the malum culpae or reciprocal action of the passions his soul breathed nothing but the childish voluptuousness of the woman. Does the witness of Jesus stand for the shechinah, the spirit of prophesy; as the first sign by which he revealed the majesty of his servants form glorifes the covenant and transforms the holy books into good, mature wine, which fooleth the steward's judgment and strengthens the critic's weak stomach? Hence, the old Erasmus's Socrates: Speak, that I might see you! This desire was fulfilled in the witness of Christ, -- who in a word of dereliction towards his torturers, offered us forgiveness, that we who knoweth not of what we do may accept him or reject him; that we may discern in him the abditory of the Father's love, or that we who knoweth not of what we do may surrender finally to the 'deumne hominem salutaret' of the Delphic Tripod, that we may sigh and be silenced under our ignorance, and the disjecti membra poetae of a Nature without God. [Themistiou philosophou, tou kai Euphradous epiklēthontos. P. 84] Adam therefor belonged unto God; and God himself introduced this first-born and elder of our race as the supporter and heir of the Earth; as an image or even numismatical inscription, in which coins of gold or silver are as the lord of the land. Angels, longing to see the Lord's heavenly courtiery, were his first ministrants and priests, and even the first diplomats unto men. To the choragus of Sammael all the children of God rejoiced, whilst under the light of his morning-star all might see for themselves, the affablenss of the quite Cyclopean artisan, who reveled in his human children. We are still his race, the differentia lies only in the fact that we are still in the making, that our life is an anezetastos which lies concealed in Christ, and has been subjected to the vanity and mancipation of our transient system, that as it were, has been choked in the Domitianian flattery of the thirsting breast of a Tacitus. What replaces the natural arrangement of verses in Homer, that without prescribed meter and in ignorance to the rules of art, which Aristotle thought up after him, seem yet to combine with themselves to work the wonders of an Epicurus's atoms, and what in the poetry of Milton amounts to conscientious fidelity; and dare I say Christian knowledge towards the veritable half of those critical laws, that in Shakespeare amounts to a marked transgression thereof? Genius! is the unanimous answer. Let the EMAUR GDL and the EMAUR KTN of theory in the land of Shinar be lifted up beyond the Heavens and the Earth, and Jerusalem no longer shall be inhabited unto her own place, but Jerusalem even shall fall under the equinox of Babel. After God had grown weary of speaking to us in Philochoric epitomes; through the Cassandra of the Scriptures, and the Helenus of nature; through poets and seers of all sorts, and in reasonings and figures, and had grown short of breath -- did he call unto men for vespers, and spoke to us at last in the day's evening, in the Urim and Thummim of yesterday and today, even through the Son.What is the most incisive knowledge of our present days, without the pneumatic anakainon, which renews the past in a divine presentiment of what is to come? If the Old Testament will not put upon itself the rubric of the New, then what Well of Egeria is this eternal petitio of our fine and good natured wits, who, drunk on the strong drink of their universal wisdom and virtutisque indole priscae 12 of brotherly love, have prattled out with Callimachian labor all the feeling of their Bible's justice into edicts and homilies which have served, nevertheless, but to commemorate the same quaestia concerning the outward perfection of rights, that, upon the inner imperfection of convictions and duties, has stifled the political experimentations of a Cain, and all the principles of a Nimrod, -- and damned his followers? Inability is no fault, as our Plato himself bears recognition; and it only becomes a fault through the will and its lack of resolution and conviction. No hero and no poet, be he a prototype of a messiah or a prophet of Antiochus Epiphanes, lacks periods in his life where he can with good cause confess unto Job; my father too, is corruption, therefor the worm is my mother and my sister, and surely I am no man. Though I were as eloquent as a Choricius, should I have no need for a hiatus; yet I could discontinue the present writing, that I might say unto you this and this only: Nature is like one of the Hebraic dicta, written in mater lectionis, and in nothing but consonants, -- herein the reason of the Law finds only her wheels and springs, which like the sons of Jerub-Baal, or the Biblic serpent beg for their own Apocalypse. Go into any congregation of Christians that you will; the language will betray their fatherland and genealogy, that they are heathen branches grafted δικαιοσυνην την εκ νομου onto a Jewish stem. The more edifying you are as a speaker, the easier will it be for you to accuse them of Lycaonian vanities; the more readily they will lift up their hands to receive from you palai lechthenta para theon dora, even after their God has withdrawn from them. Sagacity for the perpetuo divinandi curiositas is almost as necessary for reading the past as the future. I would rather study the anatomy of a Zopyrus, and take aims to dictate from an Alcibiades cachinnum the secrets of gnothi seuaton, then from a decadent lambskin accept the teachings of an ars poetica of fraternity. It is with Reason, my philosophers, as with eyepieces, whereby the flaxen hair of a Charis is become nauseating; whereby the luxuriance of a Cleopatra is found for that it is, in all the vanity of her Orient's riches, -- whereby the most Epicurean of tastes is given unto a can of worms, and the most comely of relishes is become of quite vulgarity, -- whereby the most disciplined of aesthetic is become a blundering piece of work. LO, I hath trampled upon the thistle in Lebanon, and hath been lifted up in my heart. Your life that is afforded to you, is what I am; thine arrabon is my aparche, -- namely, a breath. Do not think therefore that I should grovel before you, whine and beg to be preserved, or lament if I am all together banished from your writings. For, if I am to be made subject to your vanity, then I am to be silenced, and I will find peace: may I withdraw from you in honor like a prophet from the church. Yet, because the prophet liveth on behalf of the health of the church, and to ensure that it is not broken up, therefor in times of peace a Prophet must set upon himself. My preservation and my delivery are before your kerygma, -- are a concern for he that bears this Earth in the sworn edict: Till the Heavens and the Earth pass, not one jot shall pass away from the Law. Eye hath not seen, nor ear hath heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man. Herein is the only religion which is worthy of a supreme creature and befitting to him, and which GOD has prepared for them that love him: psittacus & corvi tandem prodibit ab ovo: sic nasci cygnos non nego posse nigros. [Plempius in Musae Emblematica.] However, is human love possible without familiarity and sympathy? - to ask this question even is to love GOD eo ipso. Yet I ask those who glory that they know God; how have you come upon this noble jawbone of beef? 13 In order to produce the knowledge of the supreme being, as you yourselves call it, on your little broken egg, you must hatch an adder; probably no more natural means is left to you for aquiring this knolwedge than for one of your brothers to travel to heaven, and descend again as Aeneas into the abyss of the dead; for God is not a God of the dead but of the living. You however, while you extend your hands towards golden branches, liveth in pleasure and are dead while yet that you live, and your true destiny is to press through to life only through death. In mortal felicity our severest oaths are perjury gainst' the blood, and burn like stalks or chaff upon it's fire. Therefor bide not in the high strained antinomies of old philosophy, nor in the chriae of the hieratic, supported by naked reasonings; but labour in the ethics of faith, built upon heavenly assistance, and the happiness of credendums. For as a mother knoweth not of what nature is forming in her bowels, so do we have slight knowledge of what our destinies make of us; understand the laws, but do not in thy henotikon therefor swear upon the doctrine of a Cleanthes or an Aristippus. Do not satisfy thy moral in Homer, and overlook Sophocles and Seneca. Let not the Seven of Greece, but the one of Israel be thy Law: let Hereclitus be thy confessional, not thy texturary and final instructor, and learn the vanity of the world rather from Ecclesiasticus than Theognis. Evangelize thy love, and if you can, get thy self an Pauline affection. Give thy scorn from upon the Cross, be an Aurelius in thy faith, and sermonize thy philosophy. Flesh and blood recognize no other God beside the universe, and the shema wherein they shew their faith, - hunger and fatigue. It would not befit any Polyeidos, the greatest of Lycian sages, whom knew of how to tame the Pegasus; nor any Belshazzar, to whom the God of the Jews even had uttered monitions; it would befit only a moralist without shame or contrition, only a Nimrod, to cry out in the state of nature, "To me, and to me alone, appertains the right to decide whether, and for whose benefit, when, and under what conditions I am obliged to exercise beneficence." The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and his evangelical love, which may be said to extend even to auro turbidus, is the conclusion thereof. The investigation of money and language is as profound and abstract as their use is universal. They stand in a closer relationship than one might suspect. The theory of one explains the theory of the other; as the statesmen for the rhetorician, and vice versa, in the Poetics; 14 they therefore appear to be derived from a common ground. The wealth of all human knowledge rests upon the eye of a Phorkyad, and as for Zephyrus, in the defense and command with, and in the mutual exchanges of words; 15 and it was a theologian of penetrating wit who pronounced theology sub ratione Dei, to be the grammar of a quite divine Aeneid. On the other hand, all the goods of political or social life take money as their ideal or nomisma, which even Solomon was said to have recognized. The reccomendation of a new teologia mistica in politics and ethics gives wings, thought often times merely waxwings, to the name of an author; and though there nothing is to boot, between a Bean and a Satyrion root, 16 we should not be startled by the fact that a Varro, through his work on agriculture and etymology, has secured for himself the title of the most learned amongst the Romans. Epictetus philosophized modesty, Poliziano grammatized it, Jesus moralized it, and the Carpocratians turned it into a phylacter. According to that supervenient patten in human affairs, in which on the whole nearly everything is contrary to ειναι μονον, - is foregin and paradoxical, - having faith seems harder then moving mountains. All colors of the fairest world pale if Light, the first born of creation, is exhausted. If the belly is your God, then the faith which is under the silence of your gaping mouth provokes the suspicion over death, - as an ignorance in the Will sub lege, though you are worthier yet than many sparrows; for the race of birds is brought up from a three fold advance from the stomach. [Selected works of Ephrem the Syrian. p. 165] Out of this ignorance the step from consciousness to guilt because too slight to merit distinction. The moral, as Joash his arrow, cleaveth evenly, but falleth short. Zeno of Citium was the most vauntful man of his time, and more ambitious in refusing all honors, than Thamyris in rejecting none. The practices of men hold not an equal pace, yea, and often run counter to their theory: to respect the moral order, and to uphold it, are not the same; the former belongs to aesthetic, the latter to jurisprudence. What is the opposite of Stoicism? - a question of conscience. The love of blindness? Is there a loving breath even in sober Orcus? Whatever it may be, it is a sham; for it does not touch upon the finality of suffering: no past or future joy can erase pain now. Time, invented to this end, breaks apart the foundation of Jerusalem, and grinds it to already forgiven potsherds under Joshua. If the Will wasn't naturally capable of being suborned to acts of sin, there is no merit, but only virtue; and without the sensible conviction to be good there is no ascription of any guilt, no recognition of good and evil itself. Consciousness, attentiveness, abstraction, and even the moral conscience seem to be for the most part a dunamis and energeia of our Will, which is not a causa sui but an ens ut causatum, is the Maximum and Minimum of our human nature. To the Will however belongs not only qualitas occulta and indeterminate powers, but also the Sanchuniathonic privilege, and demotic right, to contribute to one's destiny. Pindar says, Goodness baffles the pomp of history. I should put this in the mouth of philosophers, that I may stifle their langage des halles. The historians are like the herds of Cacus, -- in searching out the origins of things these must travel backwards, and, leaving no trail to themselves, must inevitably think backwards. In the temple of learning there is truly an idol, in likeness to Konrad's Helen, who's body is not seen by the eyes of men, on account of her sheer effluence; which bears under its image the inscription philosophical history; and which has not lacked for high priests and Laconisms. Should our history become mythology, this embrace of a lifeless beauty, who's love we may never know, and who without self interest worked wildez wunder of our experience, will evolve into a fable omni ex parte beatum; cui malum crevit unicum in omne malum [Mundi lapis lydius siue vanitas per veritate. P. 104] which bears similarities to the relics of Pygmalion's life. After an unimaginable length of years, in the language of our Bible, a creator of his people such as Adam will have to be understood as poetically a sculptor of his wife, or rather, so to speak, a commisioner thereof. Yet perhaps the vexing chronicle of Philosophy and the pinacothecas thereunto are deserving of less blame than the misuse which their lovers have made of them. A little visionary superstition on the part of the thinker, or for a woman to behold her future husband on the eve of Saint Agnes, would not merit merely indulgence, but rather something of this sort of leaven is quite necessary to encourage the Soul towards its fermentation. As it is for the Doctrine of Types, so is it for Minerva, in Lessing's venerable paradox for the painter: either the human being posesses instincts, and the pyschological theory serves only to reproduce in him the innerancy of an insect, in which case it may be said to abrupt the human leaven rather then to mundify it, or the human being does not possess instincts, and the psychological theory serves no more general purpose then to dehumanize him. The Theban Plays would not have become such great exemplars for the stage if they had not made their author a master over the human heart. Socrates however surpassed both Sophocles and Euripides in wisdom, because in propagating further into self- knowledge he had discovered how to endure it. A man who is convinced that he knows nothing cannot, without giving himself the lie, have knowledge of his own good heart in potentia habitualis, but must play the Cocalus unto his eventualities. All these nods and detritus of the oldest history and pagan tradition confirm the observation that Joshua maintained against Shechem, that one shall be a witness unto himself in liberty owing before his God. The metis of Odysseus and the daemonin of Socrates bear quite similarity; whether this daemonin of his was merely a contrivance unto his diplomacy, or politcal cunning, - I leave for the reader to decide for himself. My dear Socrates, thou art the Julius Pollux of my heart, but I must tell thee, that the Oracle hath bade me to rub unto my empty stomach. For I must confess, I think of reason just as Saint Paul thinks of the Law and its vindication and academicism by the Church Fathers, I think it capable of nothing more then the knowledge of error. I am skilled enough to offer you an apology in venerable Demosthenian emphasis, though I find you have already invented your own Horae: Reason, Virtue, Happiness! and I am still awaiting a chiliastic angel with a key to the abyss. After you student Plato, ever have I chosen to gnaw at the marrowbone of human ethics, and I shall gnaw myself to death over it, possessed by the indecency of an apology. The state of mind it would require is contra to the peremptory duty of seeking self-knowledge. For I am living, and cannot myself take responcibility over my life, which is a catastrophe of such a higher order that an equation cannot be produced for it using the reins of this world. The very divinity that makes prognostications out of the wonders of nature sets apart the duties and the deeds of those called away to Sainthood. It is not the end alone, but the whole winding course of a Christian which is the masterpiece of the unknown genius who Heaven and Earth does and will acknowledge for the one and only creator. A pursuit as sincere and Romantic as the Truth is not to be adorned with Historia Calamitatum in more geometrico: efficiency is already a distortion required by morality. If Heraclitus was the weeping philosopher, if Democritus the laughing; what am I - the blushing philosopher. The venerable Stagyrite, with regard to the gregariousness of the human being, presumed the ratio essendi of oeconomia to coincide with the politician's magisterial office; thus the human is related to the animals, inasmuch as the statesmen is related to his vassalry, household, and fallow. It is not a sensus communis, or capacity to judge, which determines the human being; neither is it an instinct or natural honour; but rather our whole nature rests upon apologeomasis, upon the conscience which is also a witness, upon the conviction which convicteth alike as it excuseth. Supposing even that a human being comes into the world like an empty wineskin: then precisely this lack makes him all the more able to enjoy nature through experience and to enjoy his community through tradition. The en archei aiteisthai is the antidote to the inauthentic exempli gratia and misuse of things, and to their misunderstandings. For our reason arises, in the very least, from this twofold lesson of sensuous revelations and human testimonies, which are imparted according to similar laws, as well as by similar means, namely as res antiquae laudis. A worthy philosopher has maintained, - Deus sive Natura, that abstract notions are but particular ones appended to a certain term, which exaggerates their signification, and causes them to remind one of other individuals, - who's ghost I might raise upon the Cabbalistic epithet of a Nizolius or Leibniz. This discovery, hailed by the Skeptic as one of the most valuable for all of philosophy, certainly preserves the soul of the Socratic reasoning, which is analogy, but where is the body of that reasoning, that is irony, of which the Causa Omnium itself must be asserted?
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."
8. Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama P. 107-110
9 The erotic sympathy is integrated with the divine plan of the human being in marriage, as the Aristotelian boulesis is integrated with the object of desire in reason.
10. Adam reaches out to the rib just as Aeneas grasps the golden branch after descending to Hades.
11. The Commedia and Canzoniere by Dante Alighieri. P. 128.
12. In the poet Gratius.
13. Cratinus in the Pluti.
14. Aristotle, Poetics.
Third comes "thought." This means the ability to say what is possible and appropriate. It comes in the dialogue and is the function of the statesman's or the rhetorician's art.2 The old writers made their characters talk like statesmen,3 the moderns like rhetoricians.
15. Billingsley, Kosmobrephia or the Infancy of the World.
Soft wisp'ring Zephyrus his language, who
23: Tenders his humble service, and doth stand
24: Ambitious to defend them, and command
25: Blastings to come not neer; their thanks so shew
26: Their humble heads, the gratefull corn-feilds bow
16. Thomas Heywood in Pleasant Dialogues. P. 133. Dialogue between Menippus, Eacus, Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Socrates.Pythagoras.
Yet give me part; amongst us here below
doctrines are taught which then we did not know.
As namely that there nothing is to boot
between a Bean and a Satyrion root.
17. Euripides, Hippolytus.
pros theon, eramai kusi thôuxai kai para chaitan xanthan rhipsai Thessalon horpak, epilonchon echousen cheiri belos.
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 myster
|
081107
|
