aestheticoepistemicocritique LeontoPeonto Aesthetico-Epistemico Critique Eternity - That, with a greater knowledge of the Earth, poets call both their Phorkyad's eye and their blind Plutus! To every Eros belongs another death; for every Eros every other Eros is a death-sacrifice. My Eros, thou deep charlatanry and sucum ingenii! 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. 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 of 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! For 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. 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 the face of it. 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 world, whenever he calls out in search of his God 'non coerceri maximo, contineri tamen a minimo'. 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 hopes have 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, and I hath often felt eternity to grasp into my heart; for if I hath made the greatest sacrifice of my fatherhood to eternity, then in Pride is all of my adulteries compacted, yet pronounced free and Holy by their own hopefulness; 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 prohibted 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? Pride, that is weight; but at once weightmaster and scale. Courageous teeth hath I as well, that I might ventureth my teeth unto the sourest grapes and bitterest apples; that I might fly unto my remotest hope, -- courage! Into more remote hopes flyeth I with new wings, unto discoveries of pride which poets hath never drempt of with my wings; thither where Gods art ashamed of palladium! 081219 what's it to you? who go blather from