apologoumena0second0edition Ascolo Parodites Roman 2:15 οτινες νδείκνυνται τ ργον το νόμου γραπτν ν τας καρδίαις ατν, συνμαρτυρούσης ατν τς συνειδήσεως κα μεταξ λλήλων τν λογισμν κατηγορούντων κα απολογουμένων. οσσα τ' εν Δελφοισιν αριστεύσατε ηδε χόρτοις εν λέοντος, δηρίομαι πολέσιν περι πλήθει καλων, ως μαν σαφες ουκ αν ειδείην λέγειν ποντιαν ψάφων αριθμόν. επεται δ' εν εκάστω μέτρον: νοησαι δε καιρος αριστος. - Pindar, Olympian Odes XIII. Aliis, quia defit quod amant, aegre'st; tibi, quia supereft, dolet. Amore abundas, Antipho; nam tua quidem, hercle, certo Vita haec expetenda optandaque est. Satiety is the root of your complaint. - Terence, Phormio. Non ebur neque aureum mea renidet in domo lacunar; non trabes Hymettiae premunt columnas ultima recisas Africa, neque Attali ignotus heres regiam occupaui, nec Laconicas mihi trahunt honestae purpuras clientae. - Horace, Epodes. ετηος αντηροπου δαιμον The happiness of man, insofar as he is man, consists in his reconciliation with destiny. -- Heraclitus, Fragment 119. 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. Is Cherethites and Pelethites entirely unknown to you, my philosophers? -- the coincidentia oppositorum, and the Spirit that quickens; that is mirrored even 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. No chisel, no lyre even! but golden hair and one of Thessaly's javelins for my muse, that she may clear the floor of Shechem of the unhappiness of thy little Zalmon! 17 A deeper sleep was our most ancient ancestor's rest; and their ceremony, - upon Heaven's anapaulai, an intoxicating dance. 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. In Epimetheo hoc non erat, ut providendo adhiberet diligentiam, sed sera con sideratio & ut facti cum poeniteret, inerat. [Ioachimi Camerarii Libellus gnomologicus] 6 5 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. 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. 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. Adam therefor belonged unto God; and God himself introduced this first-born and elder of our race as the supporter and heir of the Earth; as an image or even numismatical inscription, in which coins of gold or silver are as the lord of the land. Angels, longing to see the Lord's heavenly courtiery, were his first ministrants and priests, and even the first diplomats unto men. To the choragus of Sammael all the children of God rejoiced, whilst under the light of his morning-star all might see for themselves, the affablenss of the quite Cyclopean artisan, who reveled in his human children. We are still his race, the differentia lies only in the fact that our life is an anezetastos which lies concealed in Christ, and has been subjected to the vanity and mancipation of our transient system, that as it were, has been choked in the Domitianian flattery of the thirsting breast of a Tacitus, and silenced under the 'deumne hominem salutaret' of the Delphic Tripod. [Themistiou philosophou, tou kai Euphradous epiklēthontos. P. 84] One cannot enjoy a lively friendship without sensuality, and a metaphysical love perhaps sins more coarsely against the conscience, as the flame of Achilles for Skamander, then an animal love does against the eye and supposed flesh -- male mortales odia immortalia vexant. [Chytraeus in the Silvarum] 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, yet I might discontinue the present writing, that I might say unto you this and this only: Nature is like one of the Hebraic dicta, written in mater lectionis, -- herein the reason of the Law finds only her wheels and springs, which like the sons of Jerub-Baal, or the Biblic serpent, beg for their own Apocalypse. 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, hath I trampled upon the thistle in Lebanon, and been lifted up in my heart. Your life that is afforded to you, is what I am; thine arrabon is my aparche, -- namely, a breath. Do not think therefore that I should grovel before you, whine and beg to be preserved, or lament if I am all together banished from your writings. For, if I am to be made subject to your vanity, then I am to be silenced, and I will find peace: may I withdraw from you in honor like a prophet from the church. Yet, because the prophet liveth on behalf of the health of the church, and to ensure that it is not broken up, therefor in times of peace a Prophet must set upon himself. My preservation and my delivery are before your kerygma, -- are a concern for he that bears this Earth in the sworn edict: Till the Heavens and the Earth pass, not one jot shall pass away from the Law. Eye hath not seen, nor ear hath heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man. Herein is the only religion which is worthy of a supreme creature and befitting to him, and which GOD has prepared for them that love him: psittacus & corvi tandem prodibit ab ovo: sic nasci cygnos non nego posse nigros. [Plempius in Musae Emblematica.] 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 recommendation of a new teologia mistica in politics and ethics gives wings, thought often times merely waxwings, to the name of an author; and though there nothing is to boot, between a Bean and a Satyrion root, 16 we should not be startled by the fact that a Varro, through his work on agriculture and etymology, has secured for himself the title of the most learned amongst the Romans. Epictetus philosophized modesty, Poliziano grammatized it, Jesus moralized it, and the Carpocratians turned it into a phylacter. According to that supervenient pattern in human affairs, in which on the whole nearly everything is contrary to ειναι μονον, - is foreign and paradoxical, - having faith seems harder then moving mountains. All colors of the fairest world pale if Light, the first born of creation, is exhausted. If the belly is your God, then the faith which is under the silence of your gaping mouth provokes the suspicion over death, - as an ignorance in the Will sub lege, though you are worthier yet than many sparrows; for the race of birds is brought up from a three fold advance from the stomach. [Selected works of Ephrem the Syrian. p. 165] Out of this ignorance the step from consciousness to guilt because too slight to merit distinction. The moral, as Joash his arrow, cleaveth evenly, but falleth short. Zeno of Citium was the most vauntful man of his time, and more ambitious in refusing all honors, than Thamyris in rejecting none. The practices of men hold not an equal pace, yea, and often run counter to their theory: to respect the moral order, and to uphold it, are not the same; the former belongs to aesthetic, the latter to jurisprudence. - - virtutum autem pariunt ardua & illustria, et propria gulae vicisse. [Chylosophiae, p. 319.] What is the opposite of Stoicism? - a question of conscience. The love of blindness, externa lenocina? Is there a loving breath even in sober Orcus? Whatever it may be, it is a sham; for it does not touch upon the finality of suffering: no past or future joy can erase pain now. Time, invented to this end, breaks apart the foundation of Jerusalem, and grinds it to already forgiven potsherds under Joshua. 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. Dead and unfruitful prosperity, for the Demetrius and Cresilas of our age! yet perhaps the vexing chronicle of Philosophy and the historical portraits thereof are deserving of less blame than the misuse which their lovers have made of them. A little visionary superstition on the part of the thinker, or for a woman to behold her future husband on the eve of Saint Agnes, would not merit merely indulgence, but rather something of this sort of leaven is quite necessary to encourage the Soul towards its fermentation. Eisi moi ophthalmoi te kai ouata kai podes amphu kai noos en stethessi tetugmenos ouden aeike. -- Put thy heart unto reins, as Moses, and ask God to teach thee to count thy days, for this affords the spirit great liberty. It seems far more suitable for a God to govern his intentions in vacuam palpant onerosa mole metretam, [Beronici Georgarchontomachia] through our own Solomon and Saturn, and ignes fatui; and to rouse our Hyrcanus from his political slumber, then through such remote and costly machinery as the firmament seems to our foolish eyes. One may observe for himself the manifestations of the passions everywhere in human society; as everything, no matter how remote, strikes upon the mind in a certain affect; as every individual sensation extends over the compass of all external objects, blowing up every laical situation into a public spectacle of heaven and earth. 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 ruling passion, a Daimona oicheion, [Olearius in Philosophica De Socratis Daemonio] 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. 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 the economic life 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. Come, do you not know by now, philosophers!, that there is no physical connection between cause and effect, means and intent, freedom and will, only a spiritual and ideal one, that is, blind faith, as the neo- Latinist, and greatest earthly chronicler of his country has proclaimed! -- deus antiqui promisit Nestoris annos, ut renet tecum Natus et ipse senex. [Anton Zingerle in Carmen, Aduentu Diu Caesaris Federici P. 6] 18 The merry attempt to hold the body and the soul together with balanos, as the learned commentator testifes, quoting Ovidius; not just with acorns, but also with chestnuts, even under the eylim or trees of ancient Palestine, was not an invention of the native autocthon, but only another example of God's providence. They had been born in deserts, and in cold mountains, yet had they no suspicion of the reign of famine, nor had they need to resolve through the cenobitic and inadvertent tutelage of their subjects upon a Carthusian diet. You philosophers, who will not simply permit your Bath-Quol to be answered in yes, yes! and no, no! the imagined or contrived paradise of Aristaenetian tolerance which you, malorum machinatrix facinorum, no more brazen then Martial's sulphuratae lippus institor mercis, have promised to your neophytes and odalisque, even as you have starved the horses behind the Anthus, is but a dream for Eutychus. Though your writer has no nymph of his own, and he knows of no Elysium or Arcades, wherein you poets and philosophers bless God at your pleasure, yet his infausta libido 19 blesses the arduous youth, and even the old dandy, -- not by account of his own pietism, but in a litany of childless mothers: "Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the LORD." For he whom lacks the skin of his eyes, Plato lacks covers. Neither Chrysoloras nor Lascaris will work the miracle of showing you the bright day, if you have no seen it already; and no Petronius will work the miracle of breaking up your Alphean cloud, if you have not already devoted yourself to your beloved. Like the Poet Orpheus, who has anxiously cast his eyes upon Eurydice who walks behind him, only to see her vanish, thus are we with the ancients. Just as if our knowledge were a mere reminiscence, or ingenii omnium mortalium multum debilissimi, [Eumathia Ad Euopsiam Comparata] so are we ever referred back to the monuments of antiquity, to edify our minds with memory. Why continue to use the broken cistern of the Greeks, when we, like Aristaeus, may start upon the clear waters, and living wells? What song the Syrens sang, were ostendit sermo mores animumque latentem or questions before philosophy. By Aristaeus' extensive insight into physical things he knows better than he can remember, that the wind blows where it will, though one still heareth it sighing, yet one still judges from whence it comes, and still more, whither it goes. 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. Alas! daemonic Samaritan! for readers of an anagnostical taste there can be no epithet, no unclean wineskins! when we what faithless is do faithful hold, and what is faithful faithless, - ei tis pterôsas Kleokriton Kinêsiai, airoien aurai pelagian huper plaka. [Aristophanes, Frogs.] Caeterum nullam solidam nec eminentem effigiem sapientiae consectantur, with Petrus Cunaeus. Now that Horace has completed his Laestrygonian amphora, in the typological ode to Maecenas, that one singing of the aged Bacchus in a wine jar, in which the man with whom God deals with in a sparing hand has been blessed, may that man take up finally his honor in human necessities, for one can certainly be a man without being an author. 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. 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? The prince of this aeon makes the greatest evil-doers against themselves into his favorites; his court-jesters are the worst enemies of beautiful nature, who may have Naaman the Syrian as the belly's priest. 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 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. Noble plowmen and blacksmiths have there been, ever from Cain and Tubal-cain downwards, but where does the Palladis Tamia of your accumulated Agricultural, Metallurgic, and other skills in economy lay warehoused? Our Conviction, though it be taken out of the Poet in the Georgics, of a quite Protean Neptuno visum, is worthless, till it convert itself into Conduct, and Cyrenian praecepta : till a certainty of Experience be found, upon which speculation may resolve, man is as yet fallen, and bereft of the living God of Belshazzar's Wall. Though about the Grand course of Providence, man may know nothing, or almost nothing; for the final courses thereunto deal mysteriously with him, as out of Ephesians, hyperballousan tes gnoseos agapen, -- Love, whereby Man is known by Man, and Men are made brothers, is mystery itself. Thus much has become evident, even as Justus Lipsius affirms, in his Politica, that succession is in itself an obstacle to disorder: Mankind is advancing somewhither; that all human things, as being construed in Time, and existing by virtue of Time, are given to Movement and Change, which tolerate him howsoever, like a yawning Gamaliel. To understand man, however, we must look beyond the individual and his activities or interests, and behold him at work with his fellows; partes Epimethei etiam ad Prometheum rite transferri possint, the lightning-spark of Thought, generated, or say rather heaven-kindled, in the solitary mind, however Prometheus-like, awakens it's express similitudes in another, and all minds begin to work together in memoria baptismi and Epimethian constitution. This nature, human nature, is not obvious but concealed, -- is written upon the head like the mark of Cain, ex analogia veterum. That impossible mandate, Know Thyself, I translate into the partly possible one, quanto superiores simus, tanto nos geramus summissius, Work Not Against Thine Own Constitution. Nature has taught Man the temperament of ancient Cain, inasmuch that She has also made him the true Aenesidemus. 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. 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? Get thee Greek enough to understand: the end of Man is in vitae mortalis honorem and in Action, never Thought, though it were noble; be thou a worthy Aristaeus and pursue bees. Hast thou considered Earth, the middle-shrine, as Sophocles well names her? You fell suitors of Penelope seek to govern over Nature, to tie your hands in Stoicism and take her up into your own bondages; or rather do you seek to put out your eyes with Epicureanism, for because you dream up your own inspirations, cantus pernoctatis parasiti and disjecti membra poetae, [Urbanus Prebusinus in Oratio Moradacissima, P. 16] you desire to be called a prophet? Satiare malis aegrumque dolorem libertate doma: reflection teaches us that our felicity and our very love belong unto the tola'ath and kikayon, children of the night; a lesson that Jonah, angry even unto death, had not been able to grasp, -- namely, that our very notion of happiness is thoroughly steeped in the experience which our time hereon earth has conferred upon us: illi in convivio Uraniam musam, huic Polymniam preficit. [Marsilio Ficino in Commentarium in Convivium Platonis de amore Marsilio Ficino] The only kind of happiness which could arouse pride in us exists, however, in the women who might have trusted themselves to us, in the things we wished to have told the ones we love, in the tastes that we have enjoyed. In other words, true happiness is only the immature expression of a pride which is irremediably wrapped up in the notion of redemption. A philosopher like Gnathena with her cistern sets monastic laws. Though, never-minding the Amyntas, let us not complain that we have 'fallen out of our own youth' for it is not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself that is the ashery of historical knowledge. In the age of Cicero it appears as the Graeculi, as the avengers which complete the task of education in the name of the privileged Romans. A chronicler who pipes upon arabicus tibicen, like the God of the Jews, content to make no distinctions between persons or between major and minor events, accounts for the following truth, -- nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, it is only a redeemed mankind that receives the fullness of its past, - which is to say, only in redemption has mankind been awakened to the βασιλειαν ξηαραδοξηεσαντεσ [Synesius in Anecdota Hemsterhusiana] of the past in all of its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a thesaurs omnium rerum - and that is the Day of Judgment. If the first utterance of psychology ordains the desire to see, does not the first utterance of Epicurean morality forgive the lust of the eyes? Every creature of this world shall become echini spiritus retentio, [Apostolius Clavis Homerica] your sacrificial offering and your idol. Subjected against its will, but still in hope, it sighs under its servitude; it does its best to escape your vanity, and in your most ardent embraces, it longs for that freedom in which the animals honored Adam. Et quibus intentus fallebat tempora curis, mundus adhuc nondum cum fabricatus erat? [Lavrentii Beyerlinck .in Apophthegmata Christianorvm P. 188] Without προβατυν ηθοσ, the liberty to be either good or evil, and inasmuch as a man’s needs betray him of his weakensses, there is no ascription of guilt or imputation of merit. To produce the human race from a mire or slime, to master the many vain and effusive reliques of the Posidonian and Epicurean systems, it must be brought about that future man condescends velum Timantis from the mathematical spirit to our befuddled moral atmosphere, and stands before his fellow man with fearless eyes that could look upon the awful carcass of a Jezebel and with indignance that can even judge of the portion of Jezreel. If the counselor Ahitophel is as trustworthy as Moses, it may be said that we have an animal cunning and instinct to thank afflictionem contra peccatoribus [Ziegler, Hieronymus: Heli, sive Paedonothia, tragoedia] for our knoweldge of good and evil. The moralistic pedant and elegentiarum arbiter who knows not how to lay his will into things is the satyr who hangs a fig leaf upon a eunuch. Mourning is the state of mind in which sentiment revives the empty world in flammis adolere Penati, in the form of a mask, and derives an enigmatic satisfaction or tauton thumon phagontes in contemplating it. The abyss of aestheticism opens up, as this brilliant intuition of Stratonic tolerance was finally to see all its concepts disappear into it, be they imagined or simply contrived; the elements of thirst and hunger, whose avarice makes everything savory and profitable for an Elisha, as well as Gods and Heroes, Cretes and Arabians, fall away into nothing. Where art is so firmly grounded upon a Litany of Degrees, and so fully colors our lives, as to make man one of its manifestations instead of recognizing him above all as its basis, to see man’s existence as the eternal subject of its own creations instead of recognizing him as its own creator, -- then all sane reflection is at an end. The cries of the men at Kadesh shall be made to fit mouths not their own, who knoweth not today of what is good and evil. My formula for human happiness is ετηος αντηροπου δαιμον: The fabled ugliness of Socrates had never such eclat as the aesthetic beauty of Aesop the younger. Apropos of history, I am struck by a learned man who every day reads a page of the Sophismata asinina and retains three or four sentences from it, in order to be the best historian in his neighborhood. If the devotion that consists in philosophical spirit and poetic truth, Zelum ad Pietatem, is a matter of taste; [Claudii Salmasii in Epistolarum Liber Primus] and versification, according to Maximus Planudes and Manuel Moschopulus, a matter of politics, then the less one has learned himself, the easier shall it be for him to teach others. Principally, the object of both aesthetics and ethics is beheld in materiale obiectum and not in ratio formalis obiecti. -- We are nevertheless already accustomed here to a intelligentem necesse est speculari phantasmata. [Juvenalis Annaniensis in Solis intelligentiae lumen indeficiens seu immediatum Dei. P. 261] in our way of thinking: through our actions we reverse all moments, like images in the eye, infirmanti oculo cum collyrium, as Gregory says of a saint’s anger, without even noticing anything of it, wherein Paul himself might over his worry in the paratheke be silenced in the highest vanity. Like God, great and unknown to us, is the name of our Lord and our God, stange, like those of his angels, is the name of his city. Its history and visage unite all the merely conceivable ideas of our faculty of knowledge, - ad contemptum mundi ipse mundus - all the ruling ideas that belong to it, for a sensory image of a godly state; all possible impressions and representations which seem worthy or unworthy of our applause and which cannot be indifferent either to the faculty of approbation or disapprobation, ex amphoin aston, all present and absent objects of greedy desire or loathing, everything wherein heaven, earth, and hell, life and death, blessing and curse, deficiency and redundancy, bliss and misery, are set against each other, attract each other, and repel in proprium ortum. In short, Jersusalem is an originary riddle of contradiction, whose seven inward and outward seals no finite power, without the courage of a lion and the patience of a lamb, ex Amphion aston, is in a position to open. That which from the beginning of the world no Polygnotus hath beheld in spirit, no virtuousi of the court of David hath ever heard; no scholar of Pliny and no Plato hath made discovery, nor in the concessions of an Ammonius Hermiae were any of the Greek Scholiasts afforded one stately model of light and darkness, nor hath Dionysus Exiguus foretold of it. Out of demagogues came poets, out of philosophers sophists, out of the wombs of virgins come babes, and out of the kindness of the world its malice. It is true that in the Penelope-work of creation there is not only a Yea but also a Nay, even a terrible anxiety in intellectum qui per coniunctionem ad fantasmata; [Jacques De Thereines in the First Quodlibet. P. 91.] not only gratia Spiritus but also an abyss; not only lucidity but also obliquity; not only continuation but destitution and abandonment; not only women but also ashes. Light exists as well as darkness; the first commandment was given in the Book of Genesis, 'thou shalt not eat', and the last commandment, 'love thy brother'; for there is a positive and a negative aspect of the creature. Yet it is irrefutable that creation and man are good even in the fact that all that exists in them is contrast and antithesis. In them, what furor uternius! what miracle of such infinite silence! that maketh God as to be nothing, that one must in spirit and conscience deny his existence or be a beast, that were the pistis and gnophos of Faith itself. The mystic may acquire foreknowledge, but only insofar as he accepts that it must be payed for with conscious anticipation of the damnation of this World. It would seem thereby, that even Virgil's famed 'omnia vincit Amor' were subject to the dreadful hysteron-proton whereof the light of the Messiah, the Salvation itself, and even the Day of Judgment are beyond all rational expectancy, sine necessitate incommodi. [Glosae Super Platonem. P. 158] For there is in the world sitque precor terrae, quod suerat Danae [Petrus Francius in the Poemata AD Celsissimum Principem. "The comparison of the Earth and Danae."] indeed, an entire order of monitions and sanctions which are not comprehended by God's love or his providence, and which are not therefor preserved, accompanied, nor ruled by the almighty God. What strange jurisprudence is bounded by a vintage? truth unto the last grapes of Ephraim, and error unto the entire harvest of Abiezer. How is Justice, which raiseth men up in equity, supposed to cease being what it is, deny its own essence, and rob wisdom and goodness of what belongs to them, and exchange its own immutable identity, to be silent in hope that deliverance for the Jewish people will fall upon another place, and to spin a tapestry Philomela ex machina out of such things that are as distinct from each other as they are from justice itself? Must we not regard the moral capacity and the right as ratio essendi absoluta, and duty ratio essendi alteri attributa unto the Law of Justice? [Die Bibliotheca Amploniana, Donati. P. 180] The Church and State are Laban and Bethuel; philosophy, the reserved maiden, about whom they can speak neither one way or another. Sin hath not destroyed the Nature of the flesh, but apprised it. What is the Truth? A wind that blows where it lists, whereof one hears the sound but cannot tell: whence? whither? A spirit that the world cannot receive, and thereof a frustration in the Kingdom that is not of this Earth, which the Earth takes pleasure in, natorum intuens quos det colores, even as it sees him and knows him not, pedi aut tibiae dolenti non dedignatur caput aut oculus humiliter inclinari. [Petri Blesensis Bathoniensis Archidiaconi. P. 210] Fear and Hope govern hominis manus interioris, 22 whereas Belief and Doubt, the clearest of enargestatas of which I am prepared to give account of, are a matter for the intellect, in aciem mentis, to reprobate and condone. Truth and Untruth are instruments for the intellect, tractavero improba manu, -- and true or untrue notions of good and evil are the very energeia of the Will. What sorrow! what siccandis umoribus not to know what one is, oneself; although uncertainty in one's own intentions is almost risible, for one bares the mere appearence of multum similis metuenti. We would bring nugidici ventilatores if we were to call our clever sophists poor, dumb devils when they compare the law-giver of the Jews to an ass's head. Do you not laugh when Adam the sinner chokes to death on an Apple, and Terpander the founder of lyric-poetry on a fig stem? I prey that you might be sticken silent by an angel, lest the psalms of Nebuchadnezzar excell the Psalter of David. A kingdom that belongs not unto the Earth might therefor claim for itself no other right than barely to be tolerated and endured by philosophers just as much by the Church, provided neither are willing to relate it to the birth of the World, as well as to its ornament, the very last tears! that are more precious than the last males in Jeroboam, whom shall burn as dung, just as the house of their father is burned. If there may also be praise of God even from our abandonment and destitution, even from 'the interior banishment for God's honor', 21 then why should we raise suspicion unto his secret justice which, like the veil of Cocceius, apportions the distinctions and contrasts to ourselves and others? This solicitude in the creation is the only basis upon which the realization of the dotes corporis of the saeculum is possible. For if nothing were lacking in God's comprehension of earthly providence, we should be no better than the heathen and ephectic philosophers, who carry a learned veterum pictura in dove bisognano i fatti, le parole sono d'avanzo for both poussinistes and rubenistes alike, [Antonio Vignali's Letter in Proverbs.] or those who boast of the free will of the Themenites and trust in their own conceit in insperatum auxillium, who have no knowledge of the true God and become foolishly enamored of our dear Mother Cybele. Even the linen belt of Perath and the whole of an intoxicated Jerusalem are in the hand of God. The Diana's tree of a thearchy is mirrored in the shards of Jerusalem in mensuram omnium formarum, [Gregorii Ariminensis OESA Lectura super primum et secundum Sententiarum. P. 355] in the foundation and summit of our Faith, 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 Heavens was upon the city of Israel alone, and it was dry upon the whole earth; today, dew upon the whole earth, and the spring of Jacob rests secure. The old Adam must first die before he tolerates this; before his ten acres can be made into a bath of wine, before his homer of seed can produce an ephah in grain. Woe to the suckling that riseth early in the morning: beware that you do not drink wine, for therein you shall be made to endure unto the night. The grave enlarges its appetite, and there is a time and an age for every doctrine. Unbelief were, in the most essential and historical sense of that word, the only sin against the true religion, whose heart is in heaven and whose heaven is in the heart. For what is all the eruditus luxus, which Tacitus calls the voluptuary art, the judicem an arbitrum of an Odyssey or Iliad and half the language of Ahsdod against the artless but richly significant phenomena of the Patriarch's venerable wanderings? Whether, with the assertion of man as a subject of art, it is the ‘profound truth of the senses’ as in the philosophy of Vico, that takes his place, or the vicious circle of life, as in the faith of Pascal, wherein man must regard every passion as a new heart -- it is the same pragmatism. For what does it matter whether it is the will to life or the will to destroy life which is supposed to inspire every work of art, since the latter, as a product of the absolute will, devalues itself along with the world? This reflection shows us that the image of happiness, in stricto sensu, which we harbor, like Philoctetes, 20 is steeped through and through in the time which the course of our own existence has conferred upon us. In the wilderness is there the reed that is shaken by the wind, -- one must in spirit be born an Acometae, or an Epicurean. Let us, therefor, not seek for certainty or stability. Our reason is ever seduced by moonish shadows; nothing can fix the earthly between the intellect and the reality of the Deity, which both immure and fly from it. Too much wine, the man is deceived; to little, he cares not for the Truth. '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, reflection shows us that our image of agape, of true love, echoes in spite of its critical justification the De Reformatione of Zerbolt, 'dedit etiam vires appetitivas, voluntatem scilicet ut Deum super omnia amares, caetera vero propter ipsum et in ordine ad ipsum amando referres,' and is thoroughly steeped in the daemon to which the course of our Eros has conferred upon us. Coacta virtus similis hibernae rosae, diuturna non est. Cum nihil potuit amor, justas amoris sustinent partes timor. [Tragico-Comoedia parabolica Androphilus] Yet, the kind of agape which could arouse courage in us exists only in the Diana we might have defiled, in the 090311 ... Ascolo Parodites children we could have killed. In other words, our image of true love is indissolubly bound up with the image of redeemed love. Now the true erotic consciousness is not a vaguely conceived kairos on the part of meeting a beautiful woman. If it were, it would merely sanction the temporal course of the world that is all but the unfolding of a divine love. Correctly understood - and speaking from the perspective of possible salvation - true erotic consciousness refers to the most progressive and transformational, as opposed to salvific consciousness, which is one that is aware of the visiousness and of the passions, as well of the dissonances within the horizon of its possible reconciliation. The old hedonism in the philosophy of eros must focalise in what it claims to be a perverse implication of the ideal of the profane, namely the notion that the darker and earthly aspects of eros ought to yield something approximating pleasure. Actually, the ideal of this earthliness does no more and no less than postulate that eros, properly understood, must find happiness in nothing besides its ability to stand its own ground, and to receive its earthly measure. This happiness illuminates the sensuous phenomena from the inside, hominem facit res una contiguum Deo, servare lapsos. [Hugo Grotii Sophompaneas] Just as in the internally consistent relationship of Eros with regard to the beloved spirit penetrates even the most impermeable phenomena, redeeming them sensuously, as it were, so the profane too - the antithesis of the fraudulent sensuality of philia - has a sensual appeal. For Eros, there is more pleasure in dissonance than in consonance, for there is a kind of pleasure in true love's objectively determined impossibility, a thought that metes out justice to hedonism, measure for measure. This discordant moment of realization, dynamically honed to a point and clearly set off from the homogeneous mass of affirmative moments in the passions and affections, becomes a stimulus of pleasure itself. Eros, like Psyche, is compatible with experiences of an order of magnitude similar to itself. Just as pathos mediates and sets up the boundary of emotional life, thymos sets up the boundary of erotic life. If the object of this experience is raised out of proportion to Eros, if Eros defies the earthly measure given him by Thymos, then Eros does no longer truly experience it, but registers it dia Phaidron and unmediatedly, through the daemon and its non-intuitive concept, as desire, and therefor as something extrinsic to itself, something incommensurable, to which the latter relates as coldly as to the catastrophic shock; even as Stesichorus, to avoid becoming blind, exonerates the beautiful Helen from her responsibility for the Trojan War. The aesthetic significance of this teaching of love may be found genialis munere vitis, [Beronicius] in the Euripidean insight as the akrasia which, again, postulates temptation. The subjectivity of love, the whole order of experiences which belong to Eros, frees itself from the futile dotage of appearances, but it is also its continuation. The subject, as lover, is impotent except when it is able, erotically, to respond to it's daemonic infatuations towards the body. Only the subject's eros can transcend that infatuation. Without eros, consciousness is trapped in reification, and cannot obtain to the qualitative transformation from instinct and material sympathy to subjectivity proper and to true love, just as the scene of Jupiter and Danae confounds the Danae's seductiveness, on the one hand, and Jupiter's passion: Huic amor atque cupido inerant, suavisque loquela." Siquidem hoc anni tempus in primis jucundissimam voluptatum portionem implet. nec enim nimium frigore constringimur neque nimis calescimus; sed confinium quoddam temperamenti utinque sitorum temprum leniter in corporibus sentititur. Hunc igitur aerem Homerus paulo post aetheri commiscuit. [Pseudo-Heracliti Allegoriae Homericae] Eros is a kind of premonition of subjectivity, a sense of being touched by the other. The thymotic mode of behavior assimilates itself to that other rather than trying to subdue it, as can be infered from the political role of thymos, in marriage. Eros must receive his earthly measure by Thymos - must, because if he does not, he will be completely enraptured by the daemonic, by his infatuation with the body. Thus, the saturnine conclusion of love, whose daemon is Eros, is not a naked foundering but rather the true rescat of the deepest imperfection which belongs to the nature of subjectivity itself, excogitari potest beatius, the futile dotage of appearances: Eivsdem Philosophiae beneficio Deum agnoscimus, & mundum absque autore & rectore, nec esse, nec consistere posse, comprehendimus, caterosque supernos spiritus, caetera, quae coeli amnitu continentur, agnoscimus. Eiusdem artibus morborum & aegritudinum causa percipiums. Eiusdem artibus acremediis agroti curantur, & in pristinam valetudinem reducuntur. Quarum rerum omnium cognitione & intelligentia, quid excogitari potest beatius? quove magis alatur & vegetutur animus? Nec Musicam tacitus praeteribo, qua quid potest esse ad creandos ab opere ac reficiendos animos accomodatius? quid auribus lenius? quid suavius? ut omittam quanta sit delectatio in ipsa cantus ratione, in vocis mollitudine acsiirmitare, in citharae & caeterorum instrumentorum canors fidibus, quatum tantam artem ac rationem Timotheus ille Musicus tenuisse dicitur. [Felinus Maria Sandeus's De Regibus Siciliae et Apulia, in Bartholomaei Facci De Humana Vitae Felicitas p. 126] For it is this imperfection which denies to subjectivity the fulfillment of love. Therefore, into all loving that human nature alone determines, the blind dotary of appearances enters as the real work of Eros, thanatos - the admission that man cannot love: An fors Treicias alter habebit opes? [Coluccio Salutati, conquestio Phillidis] Yet it is precisely this constitutive orientation of the subject towards the objectively determined conclusion of love's impossibility which joins eros to agape, or unconditional love. For it is in true love that passion, like affection, remains secondary, and the transition of affections make up the essence of eros, agape. If eros is a kind of premonition of a genuine subjectivity, a subjectivity receptive to the needs of the other, to the beloved, then agape reflects the baneful order of alienation to which the subject belongs, tristiciae et tamen esse modum decet, optime Moeri, [Joachim Camerarius Eclogae] and therefor unites subjectivity to actual cognition. 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 essentialy 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 splendour 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 foth 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 this interval the dialectical content of thymos and eros is exposed, as an agape. Love teaches us this: In fact we hope that the remains of the departed will soon come to the light again out of the earth. And afterwards they become gods. [The Sentences of Pseudo-Phocyclides] This profound aphorism illuminates Benjamin's concept of a salvation not posited as the telos of world history, but as a sense of happiness generated out of the acceptance and the embrace of our earthly natures, even as in Baptista Mantuanus love justifies the mind of bearing 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. 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! The apprehension of the deplorable alone causes a man to ponder whether he is not himself something ugly and deplorable: a man is pressed to consecrate himself in the eye of his Phorkyad. And until he has done so, his will unto beauty is full of vanity and illusion; for that which he thinks beautiful, may be ugly, and his ugliness shall wink with its eye unto that which is deplorable and ugly. 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? 090311 what's it to you? who go blather from