apologoumena67o Ascolo Parodites 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. BOOK 1 1. Everything that Rachel findeth is vanity: ante oculos horrendae mortis imago! Terrent mille neces: morte infoelicior ipsa est vita hominum liceat modo vitam dicere quando libertas comune bonum preciosus auro atque opibus Lydis Schithicis longeque Smaragdis pulchrius eripitur: varios tamen adde labores continuoseque simul: quosdam prope Tartara nigra: haerentesque locos Diti Stygiaeque paludi infatiatus amor lucri quoque dira cupido viscrea telluris miseros detrudit in ima unde Hecate grata praecinctum lampade Phoebu conspicere at frustra sublato lumine tentant. [Andronicus Tranquillus Parthenius in Dalmate ad Deum Contra Thurcas Oratio carmine Heroico] 2. 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.. [Baptista Mantuanus] What is greatest in winning a truly sublime woman is that it vindicates a man from the dolor of all future rejection. "Why not be rejected some time, too?" - he says to himself, after he has discovered Salmacis: "Perchance I am now beautiful enough even for that." 3. The belief in something immortal within man is the error upon which life is necessarily founded: without it, man cannot so much as digest his food, much less think. 4. Therefor let thy speech be of yea! and of nay! and let these thine articulus vel stantis vel cadentis ecclesiae be, wherein consists the whole spirit of the laws and of the Republic, or of the social contract, under whatever names they have been given. Is Cherethites and Pelethites entirely unknown to you, my philosophers? Let there be no hymn, no lyre even! but golden hair and one of Thessaly's javelins for my muse. For yesterday the sadness of thy little Shechem was upon the floor of Zalmon alone; today there is sadness upon the whole of Zalmon, and thy little Shechem may rest secure! 5. To be always in a state of optimism, nor even to abide by that noble thought, sit Galatea tuae non aliena viae, can ever be the inspiration required of compassion, much less self-compassion. Compassion is peculiar to one who is conscious, not of sharing some particular misfortune with another; for compassion does not even require empathy, but for a moment having fallen from both grace and knowledge. 6. Here I stand amidst the frozen vegetation and the bleak air, of the north, whose air licks at the ears of my mule: from all sides it is howling, threatening, shrieking at me. Suddenly, as if born out of nothingness, there appears before me the great bear of the north, walking cautiously in the silence. What? Has all the halycon and contemplation of the world commenced here? Is my self-pity itself sitting in this quiet place? Not yet to have died, but also to have never truly lived? As a testing, spiritlike, and intermediate being? As though I were that bear that moves over the pale north with its white coat, like an enormous moth into the sun! But what is the sun for it, when there is no such thing as 'warmth?' 7. The most effeminate thing ever thought about man is contained in that dictum: diversa ab illis virtute valemus, with which he first asserted himself over woman. Conversely, the greatest testament to the masculine ideal lies in the 'hoc pretium ob stultitiam fero' in which man might grasp the woman without crippling his virtue, so that he may even construct a woman out of the rib of his God. The woman, laden thereof with all the shortcomings, wounds, and folly of his masculine ideals may therefor be made a virtue-- antica fiamma, viz. the virtue of the expression of the masculine. In the latter, human nature is quite Greek, and has not even learned virtue, in the former it has entered into Christian decadence and senility. -- Then he should speak to the woman's innocence! For innocence, though it is a glorious thing, cannot be admired: it is seduced too easily. We cannot love this lamb but, and this is the question, can we love the serpent? 9. The woman's pity singeth unto her solicitude, and she calls this her love; for though a man may bring her to tears with his confessions and emendicating for forgiveness, the law of her love is yet ardeat ipsa licet, tormentis gaudet amantis. To illicit genuine commiseration in a woman, this is an impossibility provided she has fallen in love with you. For she cannot say with the elegy of Propertius: invidiae fuimus: non me deus obruit? an quae lecta Prometheis dividit herba iugis? non sum ego qui fueram. 10. Yet, when a man loves, he must betray himself of his shortcomings, all his shame and weaknesses; that is to say, he must conquer in himself guilt, by taking a woman worthy of it. Is not wounded memory the mother of all playfulness and manly gaiety? Porna suis tantum, Memmi, substernit amicis. [Theodori Bezae Vezelii Poemata P. 41] But where love is wounded certainly grows there something better than gaiety. 11. Look at him, he is so remote; so fiery, and the heat playeth upon and danceth in his eyes so that for this very reason he seems as though he may be approaching. Irriguis hortis Valtevae est clara, Minervae muneribus, lympha, quae levis ore calet. [Gioanni Hercolani Epigrammata] 12. It is not wise to pronounce things shallow or empty: for that is how we begin to love. Make no mistake, a dulce malum hides behind every charge of shallowness. And this holds especially true with regards to woman! 13. But more importantly have I discovered this: that a man's love, that is the profoundest humanity, because it testifies to and preserves the law of the sexes: all propriety, with respect to the manner of the sexes, is surely born out of this. Conversely, all impropriety and solecism is born from the woman's love. With it, enters flamboyance into man, the gloating over and parading of women, contestation of all kinds, etc. All of these defects are absent in the man that has had little experience in being loved by women: this is not a coincidence. 14. Pity is her pax Cererem nutrim, solicitude her pacis alumna Ceres. 15. What is then the secret of thy meager happiness, woman? I find it expressed in the contention of Blesensis, facilius sustineantur; sic cor humanum necesse est igne charitatis accendi, ad hoc ut de facili sustineat tribulationes, that the disposition to doing good bolsters a good disposition. 16. Yet, when a man stands in the midst of his own beauty, in the midst of his own northern airs of taciturnity and reservation, and not the beauty of a woman's vanity and shortcoming; he is likely to see gliding past him silent, magical creatures whose happiness and seclusion he yearns for- his own mistakes, his own wounds, his own shortcomings: and that is no meager happiness. Yet, even with this yearning, man almost believes that his greater self lives there amongst the shortcomings, the humiliations, the injuries: in these quiet regions even the fiercest air, even the howling air, turns into deathly silence, and in the most remote northern regions, where you will find the white bear, youth itself even turns into a dream of youth. 17. And what is the most alien love to woman? The love of work: the love of writing, tilling, tending, etc the recedant vetera of life. Some of them garden... and that is only to remind themselves that there is such a thing as work! 18. The voice of the disappointed lover says: "I listened for a trembling, for a faultering note to remind me that this performance was not a trick- and I heard only beautiful music." For the voice of Anteros replies: "Now I shall love only the women who speaks to me with this music." 19. Cui respondit intuens rotae, volubilitatem in qua mox summa max ima funt, cogito de nostra fortuna. Infini enim animi est, hominis parum sibi constantis, qui perpetuum vitae tenorem somniet. [Edinus Cyriacus in Momos et artium liberalium mastygas] Yet no one any longer perishes of that serpent, prevarication and falsehood: the poets themselves, once the mothers of falsehood, are now themselves falsehoods- and, in a word, have become antivenoms. Now their sure appointment is to convince one that the heavens and hells to which he has risen and fallen warrant nothing less than the epicism with which he has convinced himself of their existence, victrix causa deis placuit sed victa Catoni. 20. What is a poet? A timid man who hides unfulfilled and inarticulate desires deep within his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh of mere foretaste passes through them, it acquires the sound of lovely music and the promise of satisfaction, enunciation, and vision in his audience. His fate is like that of Pandareos's daughter, the greenwood nightingale who, perched upon the deep foliage, cries out in the manifold strains of her voice, in mourning for her son Itylos; even as her mind is, like Penelope's, divided this way and that; or it may even be said of him, est consanguineae fragilis caro reddita terrae, spiritus unde prius venerat astra colit. [Ianus Pannonius in Sylva panegyrica ad Guarinum Veronensem, Epigrammata. P. 63] He exerts his beauty through his imperfections, his music most touching when it is timid and broken, for those who flock around him say: 'may you yet sing!' - that is, may new vagaries torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for your longings and your sufferings would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful: this tremendous lust in your soul for vision, though you may never share it, is solely what we honor in you- unspoken, untried, your virginity! The philosopher then says to him: "Succubet imperio veneris; se jussa retractat virgineae gravitatis honos. [Barlaeus Cynismus P. 110] Surely, it is from this tremendous desire in your soul that you derive your equally tremendous eloquence of desire and craving. Then may you use that eloquence to lift your audience above your works and lend them wings to rise to heights which they would otherwise never reach- it is because you have made them into seers and poets that they give you due admiration. 21. Yet a longing for beauty abideth in me now, which speaketh in all the measure and cadences of beauty: this song shall I therefor name seduction. Depth am I: how I long for a luminary, that it might pierce into my effluence, even that I would dance unto seduction like the stream before the moon, whose timidity danceth unto seduction, and steppeth on the toes of temptation! Alas, why am I not full of light and like unto the sun? How joyfully would I then eat of the fruits of the dying year, and how babishly would I sup of the milk of this night, oh! how would I find ardor in silence like unto a nursling at breast! And even you would I bless, ye billowy clouds, who steal away the moon from me and become argent thereunto! Oh, how ye do remind me of myself: I am argent, and even I have put out the light of my own luminary, the woman! who is as aurum, that is too clumsy a temptation wherewith my timidity to dance unto! And certainly, even I live unto my own depths, and unto my own mirages in my depths: I approach these woman, these mirages, and lo! Ever back unto myself my timidity do I disprove; and oft have I dreamt that seducing must be more blessed than tempting. 22. What foul words are these: tanti tibi non sunt opaci omnis arent Tagi, quodque in mare volvitur aurum ut somno careas. Ye do not mean to execute, ye women, tota proles Eoli pugnaxque proles invicim, [Marcus Zuerius in Poemata P. 112] though until the man hath bowed his head? It is to you that the charge of pregnancy is placed? What of it? It is to us men, that the charge of the living is placed. What does man know of the pains of birthing, what does the woman know of the pains of living? Verily, the soul of a man is beautiful with the pains of life; the soul of a woman is beautiful with the pains of birth. Verily, do I purify my body in a woman's beauty: do I purify my soul in the man's beauty. 23. A good aphorism must be at once the square and square root of a feeling. An aphorism is a dissolution of psychological impulses which, before being suddenly isolated, must have been thoroughly confounded. The philosopher must first be repleted with all sorts of experience and thought before he can incense the aphorism with the friction of adherent and determined social critique, so that the slightest friendly or hostile touch can elicit brilliant shows of embers from it- or dangerous flames. 24. A thing is within me, I call it forgetting. It hath hitherto clung unto every sorrow of mine. For forgetting may be the most awkward memory but is yet the profoundest- forgetting that clingeth. For in every forgetting there is a stirring music of sorrow: dulcia surenum cantu magis, e quibus omnis pendula spes animae statque caditque meae. [Iosephi Scaligeri Poemata omnia, ex museio Petri Scriverii. P 279] And if it clingeth unto sorrow- there is the power of interpretation. Verily, forgetting that graspeth and stretcheth is the greatest interpreter of wisdom! 25. Forgetting is the greatest interpreter; forgetting interpreteth even self-pity. But self-pity is the deepest abyss. As deep as man looketh into self-love, so deep he looketh into self-pity. 26. Mundi theatris evehit: ac cedro aeternitatis facta tanto principe digna: [Alcaicum orosphonema] Vagary has made men of beasts: might not a heated nationalism, a noble resolve, a determination- be capable of makings beasts out of men? 27. The first excited nerve of sobriety only serves to deepen the state of intoxication. Whoever enjoys beauty escapes Adonis; whoever embraces lust falls under his power. The Adonis awaiting a person in lust, however, is a lesser god than the one that the relisher of beauty has fled, nulla suos uxor melius iactabit amores: nam mori ut euridice bis bene nulla potest. et si forte mori cuiquam bis posse daretur: euridice fieri non tamen ulla velit. [Actius Sincerus Sannazaro in Epigrammata] This Adonis is no longer at home in the vita activa; his dwelling is the world at large, totum spirant praecordia phoebum. [Cybeleius, Valentinus: Opusculum de Laudibus] 28. In the case of perfections, or genuine beauties, we are by a certain nature inclined to abstain from the vital impulse, and even the spirit of knowledge is treated with utter condescension: we rejoice in the present fact without any mind to the truth of perfections, beauties, to genius- taking them for granted, as 'the indestructibility of that highest life in all things.' We nearly feel that an Alexander must one morning have gaily constructed a Persepolis out of the tremendous weights of stones: yet an artists knows, as well as any good Thais, that his work is 'perfected' only when it excites a belief in a miraculous suddenness, even as the splendor of Diana before the light of Phoebus: nonne rubent coeli radiis melioribus ignes, cum Phoebo graditur Phoebe comes? [Barlaeus in Cimbrica P. 8] Therefor he may assist this illusion and introduce these elements of drunken sleeplessness. BOOK 2 29. The record of our names is but the utterance and rumor, the illatabilem locum in which we walk, and is actually nothing but an indicant of the countersign which we hold within us -- vita privatus. [Hieroclis Alexandrini Commentarius in Aurea Carmina Pythagoream. P. 183-187] Thus, the salience of the passions, and of the curiosities of man, are audibly expanded into all of our social endeavors: such as our appropriation of the universal, and the application to ourselves of what is remote, and to contrariwise extend our personal experience over the whole of the human world, to portray everything as similar to ourselves and to spread our portrait over the whole of nature in veritas moralis. 7 L imagine communemente e chiamata quella parola, o figura, che fi colloca nel Luogo; accio ci rappresenti quello, di che ci uogliamo ricordare, E si come il Luogo e affomigliato alla carta; cosi l Imagine e corrispondente alla scittura distesa nella carta: [Filippo Gesualdo in Plutosophia P. 34] The passions are the effecteur privilegie de la memoire of the creature, without which the intuition of philosophical ideas is impossible - that is the final item in the musaeum of knowledge which had to transform the energeia of world-history into political entelecheia. 30. Why then should we with deep sighs lament the lost poetry of Solon, or the treatises of Aristotle; or deplore that conflagration of the Library of Alexandria? for if no young sparrow falls to Earth without God, then no monument of the ancient world has been lost to us that we should despair. Socrates! Might I take upon myself that conviction of your apologeomasis, that I may open the eyes of the reader, that perhaps he might see hosts of polities, and schemes of government ascend to the firmament of pure understanding, and hosts of moralities and philosophies descend to the depths of a mere perceptible sensibility, to be regarded as nothing more than archaism and superstition, - on a ladder which no man dreams, - whereon even the greatest of social Homers nods, and the dance of the Manhanaim or twin hosts of Reason, the kenosis of God and the perisseia of the Son, in the secret and vexing chronicle of their courtship and ravishing,- and the whole theogony of the Shulamite and muse, in the mythology of light and darkness. 31. The creation of the logos dikanikos however relates to the creation of humanity as charis to psalmistic poetry. Do even the characters of epic poetry lose their natural meaning, if they remind us, in the infinite drama of their combinations into arbitrary signs, of the Ideas, which if not in Heaven, are in the mind? Should one raise the whole justice and meritorious Areopagy of a Homer upon the corpse of his letter; in what faithlessness does the Spirit speak therein? 32. Day rangest unto Day, and one Night disclosest itself unto another. Even to the peirata technes and ends of the world this covenant is heard, whereof God revealed himself to the creature through the creature. Thus the unity of God is even mirrored in his works, in proof of a miracle of such infinite silence, that maketh God as nothing before the creation in igne igne vetat excitari, -- [Schottenius, Hermann: Colloqvia Philosophica, & consolatoria, ac exhortatoria] that one must in conscience deny his existence or be a beast; but at the same time of such immutability, that fulfills all in all, that one cannot flee from his ardent solicitude. 33. Our Philosophy would needs take another form, if one studied the fate of this word: Philosophy; by heads, races, and peoples, according to the bowery of the times, - not as a philosopher ones self, but as the painter who steps back, to admire their Olympian games. The Poet at the beginning of days is the same as the thief at the end of days; therefor Adam might have read verses unto Methusselah, and Methesselah unto Noah, who would sing unto the days of the Son of Man. 34. Whilst the world was early bad, and while the Earth before the seventh day were still a Chaos, the first sin was the most deplorable of any, and a Phrygian like Aesop taketh time to grow wise. Thus the youngest impieties were surely of the keenest dyestuff, and overwhelmed their memories with themselves; and, shutting up the first windows of Time, left no history of those longevous generations, where men might have been properly historians. 35. In thy self be substantially great, and in virtue more than thou appearest unto others, who, in their vice, have been deceived in Heaven. Think not thine own shadow longer than that of others, or before the seminal of your fathers. If you needs offereth a consolation before the length of Elihu, then do not fall short of the concern of Socrates. Look not for victuals in the Euxine Sea, nor for the majesty of hospitable waters; neither seek profundity in shallowness, nor great fortune in slight occasions. Though methinks Pygmalion would not have gotten his Phocensian victory, if he would have been given the patience of Diogenes who made orations unto statues, and taught to rely upon silent and dumb rememberances, rather then to foster hope in the characters of good things without rendering assuefactions unto them, and to preserve the intuitions which love had placed upon him. In every clime we are with Meroian shadows cast upon Antiscian states, and with our light cometh our shadows and darkness to walk beside us. Place not the expectation of great happiness or patient felicity here below, nor hope with Heaven to crown the Earth basileus; wherein our contentments stand upon the tops of pyramids, and the greater insecurity of their enjoyments abrupteth our serenitudes. Get thee an Arimaspus eye upon the characters of good things, nor lookest thee upon opprobrious affairs till thou overlookest them. Many are too early old, and before the date of their endedasmenae. Adversity lengtheneth our days, and Time makes no Atropos unto our sorrows; in the long habit of our living which cheateth us into the indispostion for dying, whereof we set to chew as upon mastic. Men live only by hyperbole and trope, and pass from one sleep unto another. But to learn from the story of Tiresias, who was blind upon the Earth, yet saw in his psyche or soul more than all the rest in Hell; that to die were better than to study the ways of death, were accomptable unto high virtue, and strictly the course of a Philosopher. 36. To dissect a body or an event down to it's first elements is to want to trap God's intenta intuito [Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters. P. 1145] or invisible being, his divinity, and very sui generis. If instinct must be as essential to the animals as will is for mankind, then perhaps instinct becomes an intuitionis obscuritate intuentur [Hugolinus Summaripa in Specimen totis systematis philosophici. ideologia caput quartum P. 133] and condition sine qua non of every animal, to elevate and promote the human being out of the sphere of the animals with all the more certainty to a higher order of creatures. 37. When Paul of Tarsus saith that the first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit, - or when Elohim prophesies, See! Adam hath become like unto us!; or as philosophy blusheth when Solomon testifies that all is vanity under the sun, and an old coxcomb whistles it after him; one sees that the same truths can be expressed in quite an opposite spirit. Human nature remains from the beginning to the end of days as much like the kingdom of God as leaven, indeed, the relation between the human being and God is as the grape to vinification; the body to the soul as leaven is to fermentation. 38. Sophocles and Euripides would not have become such great exemplars for the stage without the art for dissecting the human heart. Thus, as Meister Eckart says, that Man's heart is the labor of created things, not of god, - for God dwelleth not there - are we not left, in place of Spinoza's amor intellectus dei, the intellectual love of God, a practicum intellectus dei, or practical love of God? Letteth wise men's curiosity be roused by new stars, and letteth them to bring Myrrh and Frankincense, and their Gold! - for wisdom is apart from all things, and these are more worthful to us then their magic. 39. The analogy of the natural economies, of the plants and of the animals, is the only ladder to the anagogical knowledge of the trichotomia and spiritual economy, which quite probably alone may resolve and complete the phenomena and homines carnivori ex mutua caede vivebant of that visible and abbreviated half. [Antonii Genuensis: Disciplinarum metaphysicarum. P. 66] The philosophers have always given truth a diffarreation, amongst other heresiarchs in psychology, by separating what nature has joined together and vice versa, and in this fashion their Clements, Socinians, and Priscinians have emerged, all of which have tried to give an account of the soul by a solitary Entelecheia. Because the mystery of confarreation between such opposed natures as the outer and inner person, the protonema sarkos and anthropu kardias, is great; perhaps in order to attain a comprehensive idea of the fullness in the unity of our human being a recognition of several characteristic earthly markers is necessary. Therefor man's flesh is not just grass, but Man is a son of the field; and not just a Son of the Field, but King of the Fallowcrop, and sent to tending upon the herbages therein, and to separate the enemy weeds, - for what is a field lacking seeds, and what is a King without demesne and exchequer? 40. Neither the pietetistical thoroughness of the Pharisee, nor the luxuriance of Sadducean poets will renew the simplici intuitio of the Spirit, which in the 'Fear of God' impelled, in the whole teleology of moral action, the Holy people of God to speak and to write. 41. This is the compend of all Philosophy: pseude metamonia tamnoisai kulindont elpides, the heart tendeth to empty itself in traversing it's own wounds. I shall essay to have my Syon peace: the prayers of Saints can no way choose, but please. [Natures Embassie: Divine and Morall Satyres: Shepheards Tales, Both Parts ... By Richard Brathwaite] 42. Because light were the first born of creation, properly Paradise were but a daughter out of the Earth, and but a part in the fairest world; in high vanity do men admire the lustre of visible creations, when things truly glorious art not just invisible but exceeding in the depth of that sense, and Paradise were not just before our knowledge but also lost to our realization. 43. Adam, from the gleam in his own heart, realized in the hemisphere of his sex cognitio Dei naturalis insita, the character of Eve; who may be said to have completed that gender cognitio Dei naturalis aquisita, under the noble prospect of Wedlock. Without the sacrifice of his innocence, Adam would have not discovered that jewel and holiness of his chastity,- the entrance to which would remain impenetrable, as Cicero's reliquarum virtutum or unlived virtue. In what slumber, Adam, in what incense did you cry out in appropriation, and foolish, young enthusiasm, as you beheld that rib: 10 This is bone of my bone! All of the mystagogical rites of Hera therefore are glowering oneirocriticisms that are related to that deep sleep in which the first woman came into the world, that may be taken for an ingenious archtype for the mother of all the living. The catastrophe of Adam's entire way of thinking became the foundation of a sympathy 9 that was swiftly elevated to identity with its object in malum morale. [Aristotle, De Anima 9.432b5. - boulesis is elevated to identity with it's object in the reason.] Whilst all of the strengths of the masculine soul seemed to pass into him, meanwhile through the malum culpae or reciprocal action of the passions his soul breathed nothing but the childish voluptuousness of the woman. 44. Adam therefor belonged unto God; and God himself introduced this first-born and elder of our race as the supporter and heir of the Earth; as an image or even numismatical inscription, in which coins of gold or silver are as the lord of the land. Angels, longing to see the Lord's heavenly courtiery, were his first ministrants and priests, and even the first diplomats unto men. To the choragus of Sammael all the children of God rejoiced, whilst under the light of his morning-star all might see for themselves, the affablenss of the quite Cyclopean artisan, who reveled in his human children. We are still his race, the differentia lies only in the fact that our life is an anezetastos which lies concealed in Christ, and has been subjected to the vanity and mancipation of our transient system, that as it were, has been choked in the Domitianian flattery of the thirsting breast of a Tacitus, and silenced under the 'deumne hominem salutaret' of the Delphic Tripod. [Themistiou philosophou, tou kai Euphradous epiklēthontos. P. 84] 45. One cannot enjoy a lively friendship without sensuality, and a metaphysical love perhaps sins more coarsely against the conscience then an animal love does against the eye and supposed flesh -- male mortales odia immortalia vexant. [Chytraeus in the Silvarum] 46. What replaces the natural arrangement of verses in Homer, that without prescribed meter and in ignorance to the rules of art, which Aristotle thought up after him, seem yet to combine with themselves to work the wonders of an Epicurus's atoms, and what in the poetry of Milton amounts to conscientious fidelity; and dare I say Christian knowledge towards the veritable half of those critical laws, that in Shakespeare amounts to a marked transgression thereof? Genius! is the unanimous answer. 47. Let the EMAUR GDL and the EMAUR KTN of theory in the land of Shinar be lifted up beyond the Heavens and the Earth, and Jerusalem no longer shall be inhabited unto her own place, but Jerusalem even shall fall under the meridian of Babel. After God had grown weary of speaking to us in Philochoric epitomes; through the Cassandra of the Scriptures, and the Helenus of nature; through poets and seers of all sorts, and in reasonings and figures, and had grown short of breath -- did he call unto men for vespers, and spoke to us at last in the day's evening, in the Urim and Thummim of yesterday and today, even through the Son.What is the most incisive knowledge of our present days, without the pneumatic anakainon, which renews the past in a divine presentiment of what is to come? 48. If the Old Testament will not put upon itself the rubric of the New, then what Well of Egeria is this eternal petitio of our fine and good natured wits, who, drunk on the strong drink of their universal wisdom and virtutisque indole priscae 12 of brotherly love, have prattled out with Callimachian labor all the feeling of their Bible's justice into edicts and homilies which have served, nevertheless, but to commemorate the same quaestia concerning the outward perfection of rights, that, upon the inner imperfection of convictions and duties, has stifled the political experimentations of a Cain, and all the principles of a Nimrod, -- and damned his followers? Inability is no fault, as our Plato himself bears recognition; and it only becomes a fault through the will and its lack of resolution and conviction. 49. No hero and no poet, be he a prototype of a messiah or a prophet of Antiochus Epiphanes, lacks periods in his life where he can with good cause confess unto Job; my father too, is corruption, therefor the worm is my mother and my sister, and surely I am no man. 50. Though I were as eloquent as a Choricius, yet I might discontinue the present writing, that I might say unto you this and this only: Nature is like one of the Hebraic dicta, written in mater lectionis, -- herein the reason of the Law finds only her wheels and springs, which like the sons of Jerub-Baal, or the Biblic serpent, beg for their own Apocalypse. 51. Go into any congregation of Christians that you will; the language will betray their fatherland and genealogy, that they are heathen branches grafted δικαιοσυνην την εκ νομου onto a Jewish stem. The more edifying you are as a speaker, the easier will it be for you to accuse them of Lycaonian vanities; the more readily they will lift up their hands to receive from you palai lechthenta para theon dora, even after their God has withdrawn from them. Sagacity for the perpetuo divinandi curiositas is almost as necessary for reading the past as the future. I would rather study the anatomy of a Zopyrus, and take aims to dictate from an Alcibiades cachinnum the secrets of gnothi seuaton, then from a decadent lambskin accept the teachings of an ars poetica of fraternity. 52. It is with Reason, my philosophers, as with eyepieces, whereby the flaxen hair of a Charis is become nauseating; whereby the luxuriance of a Cleopatra is found for that it is, in all the vanity of her Orient's riches, -- whereby the most Epicurean of tastes is given unto a can of worms, and the most comely of relishes is become of quite vulgarity, -- whereby the most disciplined of aesthetic is become a blundering piece of work. 53. LO, hath I trampled upon the thistle in Lebanon, and been lifted up in my heart. Your life that is afforded to you, is what I am; thine arrabon is my aparche, -- namely, a breath. Do not think therefore that I should grovel before you, whine and beg to be preserved, or lament if I am all together banished from your writings. For, if I am to be made subject to your vanity, then I am to be silenced, and I will find peace: may I withdraw from you in honor like a prophet from the church. Yet, because the prophet liveth on behalf of the health of the church, and to ensure that it is not broken up in war against itself, therefor in times of peace a Prophet must set upon himself. My preservation and my delivery are before your kerygma, -- are a concern for he that bears this Earth in the sworn edict: Till the Heavens and the Earth pass, not one jot shall pass away from the Law. Eye hath not seen, nor ear hath heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man. Herein is the only religion which is worthy of a supreme creature and befitting to him, and which GOD has prepared for them that love him: psittacus & corvi tandem prodibit ab ovo: sic nasci cygnos non nego posse nigros. [Plempius in Musae Emblematica.] 54. Yet I ask those who glory that they know God; how have you come upon this noble jawbone of beef? 13 In order to produce the knowledge of the supreme being, as you yourselves call it, on your little broken egg, you must hatch an adder; probably no more natural means is left to you for aquiring this knolwedge than for one of your brothers to travel to heaven, and descend again as Aeneas into the abyss of the dead; for God is not a God of the dead but of the living. You however, while you extend your hands towards golden branches, liveth in pleasure and are dead while yet that you live, and your true destiny is to press through to life only through death. In mortal felicity our severest oaths are perjury gainst' the blood, and burn like stalks or chaff upon it's fire. 55. Therefor bide not in the high strained antinomies of old philosophy, nor in the chriae of the hieratic, supported by naked reasonings; but labour in the ethics of faith, built upon heavenly assistance, and the happiness of credendums. For as a mother knoweth not of what nature is forming in her bowels, so do we have slight knowledge of what our destinies make of us; understand the laws, but do not in thy henotikon therefor swear upon the doctrine of a Cleanthes or an Aristippus. Do not satisfy thy moral in Homer, and overlook Sophocles and Seneca. Let not the Seven of Greece, but the one of Israel be thy Law: let Hereclitus be thy confessional, not thy texturary and final instructor, and learn the vanity of the world rather from Ecclesiasticus than Theognis. Evangelize thy love, and if you can, get thy self an Pauline affection. Give thy scorn from upon the Cross, be an Aurelius in thy faith, and sermonize thy philosophy. 56. Flesh and blood recognize no other God beside the universe, and the shema wherein they shew their faith, - hunger and fatigue. 57. It would not befit any Polyeidos, the greatest of Lycian sages, whom knew of how to tame the Pegasus; nor any Belshazzar, to whom the God of the Jews even had uttered monitions; it would befit only a moralist without shame or contrition, only a Nimrod, to cry out in the state of nature, "To me, and to me alone, appertains the right to decide whether, and for whose benefit, when, and under what conditions I am obliged to exercise beneficence." The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and his evangelical love, which may be said to extend even to auro turbidus, is the conclusion thereof. 58. The investigation of money and language is as profound and abstract as their use is universal. They stand in a closer relationship than one might suspect. The theory of one explains the theory of the other; as the statesmen for the rhetorician, and vice versa, in the Poetics; 14 they therefore appear to be derived from a common ground. The wealth of all human knowledge rests upon the eye of a Phorkyad, and as for Zephyrus, in the defense and command with, and in the mutual exchanges of words; 15 and it was a theologian of penetrating wit who pronounced theology sub ratione Dei, to be the grammar of a quite divine Aeneid. On the other hand, all the goods of political or social life take money as their ideal or nomisma, which even Solomon was said to have recognized. The recommendation of a new teologia mistica in politics and ethics gives wings, thought often times merely waxwings, to the name of an author; and though there nothing is to boot, between a Bean and a Satyrion root, 16 we should not be startled by the fact that a Varro, through his work on agriculture and etymology, has secured for himself the title of the most learned amongst the Romans. 59. Epictetus philosophized modesty, Poliziano grammatized it, Jesus moralized it, and the Carpocratians turned it into a phylacter. 60. According to that supervenient pattern in human affairs, in which on the whole nearly everything is contrary to ειναι μονον, - is foreign and paradoxical, - having faith seems harder then moving mountains. All colors of the fairest world pale if Light, the first born of creation, is exhausted. If the belly is your God, then the faith which is under the silence of your gaping mouth provokes the suspicion over death, - as an ignorance in the Will sub lege, though you are worthier yet than many sparrows; for the race of birds is brought up from a three fold advance from the stomach. [Selected works of Ephrem the Syrian. p. 165] Out of this ignorance the step from consciousness to guilt because too slight to merit distinction. 61. The moral, as Joash his arrow, cleaveth evenly, but falleth short. Zeno of Citium was the most vauntful man of his time, and more ambitious in refusing all honors, than Thamyris in rejecting none. The practices of men hold not an equal pace, yea, and often run counter to their theory: to respect the moral order, and to uphold it, are not the same; the former belongs to aesthetic, the latter to jurisprudence. - - virtutum autem pariunt ardua & illustria, et propria gulae vicisse. [Chylosophiae, p. 319.] 62. What is the opposite of Stoicism? - a question of conscience. The love of blindness, externa lenocina? Is there a loving breath even in sober Orcus? Whatever it may be, it is a sham; for it does not touch upon the finality of suffering: no past or future joy can erase pain now. Time, invented to this end, breaks apart the foundation of Jerusalem, and grinds it to already forgiven potsherds under Joshua. 63. If the Will wasn't naturally capable of being suborned to acts of sin, there is no merit, but only virtue; and without the sensible conviction to be good there is no ascription of any guilt, no recognition of good and evil itself. Consciousness, attentiveness, abstraction, and even the moral conscience seem to be for the most part a dunamis and energeia of our Will, which is not a causa sui but an ens ut causatum, is the Maximum and Minimum of our human nature. To the Will however belongs not only qualitas occulta and indeterminate powers, but also the Sanchuniathonic privilege, and demotic right, to contribute to one's destiny. 64. Pindar says, Goodness baffles the pomp of history. I should put this in the mouth of philosophers, that I may stifle their langage des halles. The historians are even like their herds of Cacus, -- in searching out the origins of things they must travel backwards, and, leaving no trail to themselves, must inevitably think backwards. 65. In the temple of learning there is truly an idol, in likeness to Konrad's Helen, who's body is not seen by the eyes of men, on account of her sheer effluence; which bears under its image the inscription philosophical history; and which has not lacked for high priests and Laconisms. Should our history become mythology, this embrace of a lifeless beauty, who's love we may never know, and who without self interest worked wildez wunder of our experience, will evolve into a fable omni ex parte beatum; cui malum crevit unicum in omne malum [Mundi lapis lydius siue vanitas per veritate. P. 104] which bears similarities to the relics of Pygmalion's life. After an unimaginable length of years, in the language of our Bible, a creator of his people such as Adam will have to be understood as poetically a sculptor of his wife, or rather, so to speak, a commisioner thereof. Dead and unfruitful prosperity, for the Demetrius and Cresilas of our age! 66. Eisi moi ophthalmoi te kai ouata kai podes amphu kai noos en stethessi tetugmenos ouden aeike. -- Put thy heart unto reins, as Moses, and ask God to teach thee to count thy days, for this affords the spirit great liberty. It seems far more suitable for a God to govern his intentions in vacuam palpant onerosa mole metretam, [Beronici Georgarchontomachia] through our own Solomon and Saturn, and ignes fatui; and to rouse our Hyrcanus from his political slumber, then through such remote and costly machinery as the firmament seems to our foolish eyes. One may observe for himself the manifestations of the passions everywhere in human society; as everything, no matter how remote, strikes upon the mind in a certain affect; as every individual sensation extends over the compass of all external objects, blowing up every laical situation into a public spectacle of heaven and earth. 67. As it is for the Doctrine of Types, so is it for Minerva, in Lessing's venerable paradox for the painter: either the human being posesses instincts, and the pyschological theory serves only to reproduce in him the innerancy of an insect, in which case it may be said to abrupt the human leaven rather then to mundify it, or the human being does not possess instincts, and the psychological theory serves no more general purpose then to dehumanize him. 68. The Theban Plays would not have become such great exemplars for the stage if they had not made their author a master over the human heart. Socrates however surpassed both Sophocles and Euripides in wisdom, because in propagating further into self- knowledge he had discovered how to endure it. A man who is convinced that he knows nothing cannot, without giving himself the lie, have knowledge of his own good heart in potentia habitualis, but must play the Cocalus unto his eventualities. All these nods and detritus of the oldest history and pagan tradition confirm the observation that Joshua maintained against Shechem, that one shall be a witness unto himself in liberty owing before his God. 69. The metis of Odysseus and the daemonin of Socrates bear quite similarity; whether this daemonin of his was merely a ruling passion, a Daimona oicheion, [Olearius in Philosophica De Socratis Daemonio] or politcal cunning, I leave for the reader to decide for himself. 70. My dear Socrates, thou art the Julius Pollux of my heart, but I must tell thee, that the Oracle hath bade me to rub unto my empty stomach. For I must confess, I think of reason just as Saint Paul thinks of the Law and its vindication and academicism by the Church Fathers, I think it capable of nothing more then the knowledge of error. After you student Plato, ever have I chosen to gnaw at the marrowbone of human ethics, and I shall gnaw myself to death over it, although 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. 71. A pursuit as sincere and Romantic as the Truth is not to be adorned with Historia Calamitatum in more geometrico: efficiency is already a distortion required by morality. 72. Come, do you not know by now, philosophers!, that there is no physical connection between cause and effect, means and intent, freedom and will, only a spiritual and ideal one, that is, blind faith, as the neo- Latinist, and greatest earthly chronicler of his country has proclaimed! -- deus antiqui promisit Nestoris annos, ut renet tecum Natus et ipse senex. [Anton Zingerle in Carmen, Aduentu Diu Caesaris Federici P. 6] 18 The merry attempt to hold the body and the soul together with balanos, as the learned commentator testifes, quoting Ovidius; not just with acorns, but also with chestnuts, even under the eylim or trees of ancient Palestine, was not an invention of the native autocthon, but only another example of God's providence. They had been born in deserts, and in cold mountains, yet had they no suspicion of the reign of famine, nor had they need to resolve through the cenobitic and inadvertent tutelage of their subjects upon a Carthusian diet. You philosophers, who will not simply permit your Bath-Quol to be answered in yes, yes! and no, no! the imagined or contrived paradise of Aristaenetian tolerance which you, malorum machinatrix facinorum, no more brazen then Martial's sulphuratae lippus institor mercis, have promised to your neophytes and odalisque, even as you have starved the horses behind the Anthus, is but a dream for Eutychus. Though your writer has no nymph of his own, and he knows of no Elysium or Arcades, wherein you poets and philosophers bless God at your pleasure, yet his infausta libido 19 blesses the arduous youth, and even the old dandy, -- not by account of his own pietism, but in a litany of childless mothers: "Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the LORD." 73. For he whom lacks eyes, Plato lacks lids. Neither Chrysoloras nor Lascaris will work the miracle of showing you the bright day, if you have no seen it already; and no Petronius will work the miracle of breaking up your Alphean cloud, if you have not already devoted yourself to your beloved. 74. Like the Poet Orpheus, who has anxiously cast his eyes upon Eurydice who walks behind him, only to see her vanish, thus are we with the ancients. Just as if our knowledge were a mere reminiscence, or ingenii omnium mortalium multum debilissimi, [Eumathia Ad Euopsiam Comparata] so are we ever referred back to the monuments of antiquity, to edify our minds with memory. Why continue to use the broken cistern of the Greeks, when we, like Aristaeus, may start upon the clear waters, and living wells? What song the Syrens sang, were ostendit sermo mores animumque latentem or questions before philosophy. 75. By Aristaeus' extensive insight into physical things he knows better than he can remember, that the wind blows where it will, though one still heareth it sighing, yet one still judges from whence it comes, and still more, whither it goes. 76. If Necessity find a bottom in the uncomprehensive deeps of Plutus' gold, than it surely were the mother of invention. -- Every individual Truth grows into the foundation and euthynon polin of a plan, more miraculous than that ox-hide became the area of a city, and a plan more ample than dilatet Deus Japhetum, [Proverbia Salomonis] whereby the hemisphere, - et cognata iacent generis sub legibus astra, may be said to contain the tip of a point of view. 77. Alas! daemonic Samaritan! for readers of an anagnostical taste there can be no epithet, no unclean wineskins! when we what faithless is do faithful hold, and what is faithful faithless, - ei tis pterôsas Kleokriton Kinêsiai, airoien aurai pelagian huper plaka. [Aristophanes, Frogs.] Caeterum nullam solidam nec eminentem effigiem sapientiae consectantur, with Petrus Cunaeus. 78. Now that Horace has completed his Laestrygonian amphora, in the typological ode to Maecenas, that one singing of the aged Bacchus in a wine jar, in which the man with whom God deals with in a sparing hand has been blessed, may that man take up finally his honor in human necessities, for one can certainly be a man without being an author. 79. Though if the possibility, however remote, of redemption in this life were wholly abjured, the human spirit would become a vis abdita quaedam, such that the creation of the mise-en-scene would relate to humanity as epic to dramatic poetry. 80. If the passions are members of dishonor, do they cease to be the forerunners of the muse's affliction, and consequentially weapons of manhood in dispossession over Athena's counsil? da che a noi la donna precorrendo le Muse era tornata per consiglio di Pallade. [Ugo Foscolo, Legrazie.] If so, then have you put out your own eyes with Epicurus; do you truss yourself with Stoicisms, and make aim to persuade the human race, under your pillar of salt, - that Nature herself is blind? 81. The crab that cannot cast its shell perishes, because it outgrows it. So too with the 'deep thinker,' the philosopher who is prevented from casting off his own ideals- he ceases to be a deep thinker. Once more, after the crab is dead it rots in its own shell, so that its flesh is useless to all but the smallest and most insidious scavengers, small enough even to crawl into the little shells that they refused to leave. So too with the philosophers. 82. Suspicion has been raised, that God be oriented to humanity, because humanity is too much like a child to orient itself to God; and therefor God has acted that it should be easier for us to put our faith in him, then it were to humanize him, and ourselves become Apollos. 83. If one presupposes God as the origin of all actions in the great and in the small, or in heaven and on earth; then every numbered hair on our heads is just as divine as Behemoth and Leviathan, that were the beginning and the end of the ways of God. The spirit of the Principia of Moses extends itself therefor even upon the offenses of the human corpse. Consequently all is divine, and the implication of the New Testament, that we cannot walk to Paradise ex condigno, turns in the end to a play of words. 84. The fabled ugliness of Socrates had never such eclat as the aesthetic beauty of Aesop the younger. True, sunt geminae somni porta, one can be a man and dwell hopefully at the gate of ivory, without becoming a poet, or passing by the gate of horns for true dreams. Therefor do not venture into the metaphysics of the fine arts without being initiated into the orgies and Eleusinian mysteries. 85. Noble plowmen and blacksmiths have there been, ever from Cain and Tubal-cain downwards, but where does the Palladis Tamia of your accumulated Agricultural, Metallurgic, and other skills in economy lay warehoused? Our Conviction, though it be taken out of the Poet in the Georgics, of a quite Protean Neptuno visum, is worthless, till it convert itself into Conduct, and Cyrenian praecepta : till a certainty of Experience be found, upon which speculation may resolve, man is as yet fallen, and bereft of the living God of Belshazzar's Wall. 86. Though about the Grand course of Providence, man may know nothing, or almost nothing; for the final courses thereunto deal mysteriously with him, as out of Ephesians, hyperballousan tes gnoseos agapen, -- Love, whereby Man is known by Man, and Men are made brothers, is mystery itself. Thus much has become evident, even as Justus Lipsius affirms, in his Politica, that succession is in itself an obstacle to disorder: Mankind is advancing somewhither; that all human things, as being construed in Time, and existing by virtue of Time, are given to Movement and Change, which tolerate him howsoever, like a yawning Gamaliel. 87. To understand man, however, we must look beyond the individual and his activities or interests, and behold him at work with his fellows; partes Epimethei etiam ad Prometheum rite transferri possint, the lightning-spark of Thought, generated, or say rather heaven-kindled, in the solitary mind, however Prometheus-like, awakens it's express similitudes in another, and all minds begin to work together in memoria baptismi and Epimethian constitution. 88. This nature, human nature, is not obvious but concealed, -- is written upon the head like the mark of Cain, ex analogia veterum. That impossible mandate, Know Thyself, I translate into the partly possible one, quanto superiores simus, tanto nos geramus summissius, Work Not Against Thine Own Constitution. 89. 90. It is in Society that man first feels what he is, wherein he becomes what he can be, for properly he is only half alive on his own, and his only Faith, if faith it may be called which Faith is none, lies in Hunger. Yet through Society has an entirely new set of spiritual activities evolved within him. The duty of man to himself makes up the First Table of the Law merely: to this First Table is super-added a second, namely, the Duty of Man towards his neighbor, wherein Morality enters, or at least takes an altogether different form, in it's necessary application to political and economic science. 91. Is the word Duty without meaning; is what we call Duty no divine messenger to be followed, but only a Law to be imposed out of Desire or Fear? Is it the happiness of an approving conscience? Will not David of Israel go to his child, but will the child of David not return to him, and thereof will David cease to fast in the eyes of the Lord? 92. Get thee Greek enough to understand: the end of Man is in vitae mortalis honorem and in Action, never Thought, though it were noble; be thou a worthy Aristaeus and pursue bees. Hast thou considered Earth, the middle-shrine, as Sophocles well names her? You fell suitors of Penelope seek to govern over Nature, to tie your hands in Stoicism and take her up into your own bondages; or rather do you seek to put out your eyes with Epicureanism, for because you dream up your own inspirations, cantus pernoctatis parasiti and disjecti membra poetae, [Urbanus Prebusinus in Oratio Moradacissima, P. 16] you desire to be called a prophet? BOOK 3 93. Satiare malis aegrumque dolorem libertate doma: reflection teaches us that our felicity and our very love belong unto the tola'ath and kikayon, children of the night; a lesson that Jonah, angry even unto death, had not been able to grasp, -- namely, that our very notion of happiness is thoroughly steeped in the experience which our time hereon earth has conferred upon us: illi in convivio Uraniam musam, huic Polymniam preficit. [Marsilio Ficino in Commentarium in Convivium Platonis de amore Marsilio Ficino] 94. The only kind of happiness which could arouse pride in us exists, however, in the women who might have trusted themselves to us, in the things we wished to have told the ones we love, in the tastes that we have enjoyed. In other words, true happiness is only the immature expression of a pride which is irremediably wrapped up in the notion of redemption. 95. A philosopher like Gnathena with her cistern sets monastic laws. 96. Though, never-minding the Amyntas, let us not complain that we have 'fallen out of our own youth' for it is not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself that is the ashery of historical knowledge. In the age of Cicero it appears as the Graeculi, as the avengers which complete the task of education in the name of the privileged Romans. 97. A chronicler who pipes upon arabicus tibicen, like the God of the Jews, content to make no distinctions between persons or between major and minor events, accounts for the following truth, -- nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, it is only a redeemed mankind that receives the fullness of its past, - which is to say, only in redemption has mankind been awakened to the βασιλειαν ξηαραδοξηεσαντεσ [Synesius in Anecdota Hemsterhusiana] of the past in all of its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a thesaurs omnium rerum - and that is the anullus mirabilist. 98. If the first utterance of psychology ordains the desire to see, does not the first utterance of Epicurean morality forgive the lust of the eyes? 99. Every creature of this world shall become echini spiritus retentio, [Apostolius Clavis Homerica] your sacrificial offering and your idol. Subjected against its will, but still in hope, it sighs under its servitude; it does its best to escape your vanity, and in your most ardent embraces, it longs for that freedom in which the animals honored Adam. Et quibus intentus fallebat tempora curis, mundus adhuc nondum cum fabricatus erat? [Lavrentii Beyerlinck .in Apophthegmata Christianorvm P. 188] 100. Without προβατυν ηθοσ, the liberty to be either good or evil, and inasmuch as a man’s needs betray him of his weakensses, there is no ascription of guilt or imputation of merit. 101. To produce the human race from a mire or slime, to master the many vain and effusive reliques of the Posidonian and Epicurean systems, it must be brought about that future man condescends velum Timantis from the mathematical spirit to our befuddled moral atmosphere, and stands before his fellow man with fearless eyes that could look upon the awful carcass of a Jezebel and with indignance that can even judge of the portion of Jezreel. 102. 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. 103. 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. 104. 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. 105. 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. 106. The fear of death is that tiresome Cercropes which jumps onto a man's back just when he has reached the point where he is to set down his bearing, in old age, so that he may begin to enjoy the works of his life. In the first place, not many men attain to this point; in the second, those that do inevitably succumb to this malevolent fantasy. 107. 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. 108. 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. 109. 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. 110. 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. 111. 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. 112. 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 Worl 090720 ... Ascolo Parodites d. 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. 113. What strange jurisprudence is bounded by a vintage? truth unto the last grapes of Ephraim, and error unto the entire harvest of Abiezer. 114. 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] 115. The Church and State are Laban and Bethuel; philosophy, the reserved maiden, about whom they can speak neither one way or another. 116. Narcissus and the Moralist.-- "The water is not so clear to itself as to he whom finds himself beholden in it." 117. 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] 118. 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. 119. 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. 120. 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. 121. 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. 122. 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. 123. 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. 124. 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? 125. 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. 126. 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. 127. Too much wine, the man is deceived; to little, he cares not for the Truth. 128. '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. 1 Coacta virtus similis hibernae rosae, diuturna non est. Cum nihil potuit amor, justas amoris sustinent partes timor. [Tragico-Comoedia parabolica Androphilus] 129. Yet, the kind of agape which could arouse courage in us exists only in the Diana we might have defiled, in the children we could have killed. In other words, our image of true love is indissolubly bound up, poiesthai amas, with the image of redeemed love. 2 130. 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. 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. An oblique, severed, and even paradoxical piece of hope clings to this fascinatio nugacitatis, however, as something which might be preserved from from such an illusion: precisely because injustice does not, as in Levinas, constitute the entirety of existence, one experiences iniquity and its emissaries, slavery, exploitation, and murder, as heterogeneous, ego-alien. Yet, all of the elements of the erotic life existed long before the latter came into existence: affection, companionship, pleasure. Eros can pride itself on having energetically executed the previously clumsy transposition of akrasia into the sphere of immanence, on making this a principle, on divesting those elements of of their obtrusive naivetes and in opening them up to false universality of transcendence, which is already circulus vitiosus. The more absolute it became, the more semblant of agape it appeared, the more ruthless it was in excusing perverse existences, and thereby in forcing the new minotaur to pronounce the values of the old; the more elevated it became, the more impossible katharsis became. It enjoys a double victory: the truth it extinguishes, the truth of life's suffering, can without it reproduce as a lie within it; as a love that is wholly just, a love that does not betray its place anywhere in the earth, as agape. 131. 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. 132. 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: 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. 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 impossibility which joins eros to agape, or unconditional love: forma boni: formosa venus -- 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] 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, tristiciae et tamen esse modum decet, optime Moeri, [Joachim Camerarius Eclogae] therefor unites subjectivity to actual cognition. Love, in it's subjectivity, never seeks, however, to substitute itself erotically, through the semblances of beauty, 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 super-ordinates 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." 133. 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! 134. 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. 134. 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! 135. In morality too every whole can be a part; every value the remote echo of a pang of conscience- and every part can really be a whole; any impulse may overtake the entire moral vision of the world in rapture. 136. 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.] 137. 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? 138. 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. 139. 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 Helen. 140. 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, the nights in Attica made Gellius a Homer after Callimachus. 141. Aphrodite may bless all the earth, only not the Beautiful; for Aphrodite is the same as Seilenos. 142. '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. 143. Empathy is emphatically the real element of the unhappy man. If I imagine a man who himself had never loved anything, and to whom it would now be revealed all the beauty, all the richness in compassion, such that he would have to gaze back into the emptiness of his past- I should have the profoundest illustration of unhappiness. His past would be revealed in the emptiness of the emotional investment required of empathy, in the inexhaustiable emptiness of an utterly necessary passion that had never been used, a supreme and unquantifiable fundament that has hereof become a perduration which the odor of a woman, or the sight of a man caressing his dog, calls forth, which has become a ghastly, haunting paramnesia. The lover loses those he loves and vows to himself to never love again, having been born unto the knowledge of such profound, expensive, and painful investment: but he at least experiences it as a form of knowledge and vow. The imminent awakening of the empathizer- Zariadres et, is poised in his Odatidis of dreams. [Ptolemaei Eordaei, Aristobuli Cassandrensis et Charetis Mytilenaei reliquiae] 144. 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. 145. He who desires the eternal alone knows what he desires. But this sentence cannot be turned around. 146. Atalante's peril is become a wedding. 147. 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. ' 148. 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. 090720 ... Ascolo Parodites 149. 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. 150. 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.] 151. 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 thy virtue is even the virtue of a barren mother; if thy virtue toucheth upon thy deepest shame and thy most insolent beauty; if thy wickedness is a hopeful wickedness, at home in nests of beetles and under the branches of fig-trees- 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? BOOK 4 152. What is man's Good, ultimately? Wherein lies qualem praecipiti gravidum iam sorte parentem, the blessings of his pregnancy, and the knowledge that enables him to live with comfort and ease, and which ensures for him a quiet and a noble death; one that joins the ancient feeling of tragedy with the works of our life, and thus completes it? The lame, when he says that he can only get so many bushels of grain but needs more than he can get, is provided for by the state, and dies even from old age. Nihil Hippocrates, nihil Galenus mihi occultum possidet, vitam ego hominum, ubi morbi ingruunt, in manibus fero: imagine if man's truths, too, were cripples: now that is genuine ease and a day in Goshen unto a philosopher's Egypt! 153. One who despises himself aquires thereby a future for himself- which makes all things flourish and prosper: victory as well as defeat, vice as well as virtue. 154. What is the nature of human life, that were alloted our of the length of oblivion? Yet Celaeno, which Grecian religion would offer the parent of surprise, hath those seeds of time bestrewn, with procacious confrontations: whilome all that we do love, even our families and allegiances, twere' therein but consent to follow upon the plight of our good names. All things betrayeth their youth, thereunto which our eyes art closed forever. But some, through hard labor and injustice at the hands of their fellow men, art too early drawne out; and antiquated before their concurrencie with dotage, whom methinks should hath a sip from Gnathena's cup, that for because Adversitie tempereth out their Yeare, were to conquer their lives their only ambition, which Time hath no obturation unto. And those before their yeares already old in revenge: the later part of their lives is quamvis obstet mihi tarda vetustas, multaque me fugiant primis spectata sub annis, plura tamen memini. 155. We philosophers, nigra cohors operata Minervae pauperibus vires epulis recreabit, whilst we laboreth without hope in the blacker courts of Minerva, like under pocula Thessalicis doctas miscerier herbis, and Thessalian druggery, know that the only way to keep ourselves alive is to clear away the omnia turbinibus sunt anxia, the whirlwinds and all the other anxious things, with sweeter fantasies, whensoever we hath, quae te causa movet volucris Saturnia, magni ut tumulo insideas ardua Aristomenis, insideant timidae timidorum busta columbae, became fearful doves perched on the tops of the graves of the fearful, upon the graves of our authors. Let our knowledge not cripple our truths to even that extent! 156. Yet whilst I observeth the world after these descriptions hereof, Protheus exhibet, aut Stygiis homines illudimur umbris, atque oculos malus error habet, and even chance to bemocketh this whole world, I could go on, for remotus inter Corsici rupes maris, ubi liber animus et sui iuris mihi semper vacabat studia recolenti mea, eagerness surely desireth to buy the whole world with its mendacity, and is a melancholy on it's own. Even still I hath wondered about Philosophy di immortales, facinus audax incipit qui cum opulento pauper homine coepit rem habere aut negotium. For, ut non cycnorum, sic albis proxima cygnis. vix equidem has sedes et Iapygis arida Dauni, I hath not a swan's beauty, though this booke is celebris fama cunctorum per volat ora est Platanus Xerxis, nulla cicada latet, like that tree of the Persian, upon which nothing is hidden, cinnamaque costumque suum sudataque ligno tura ferat floresque alios Panchaia tellus, dum ferat et murram: tanti nova non fuit arbor, and a new tree was not worth such a greater cost. 157. Ever in our weaknesses lust counsels one thing, reason another; doessenus edacibus in parasitis, and there begins new reluctancy in men. For, as Damoxenus saith, when in excess of something, another part of us suffereth, and whenever that suffereth, another part of us begets intemperance: where Polyidas maketh a decree, Timotheus a law. The stolidum genus Aeacidarum is not imputed in certans Chalybum metallo. [Calamacius in Ruddulphottocus] 158. What then in the last resort is the love of mankind? In all man's love I see only the mercy of his God. 159. Immitis Boreas placidusque ad sidera Phoebus iurgia cum magno conseruere Iove, quis prior inceptum peragat: every man is with equal judgement placed before the cruel northern winds, that art so gentle to the stars under Jove, even though juvenibus cum Canastraeis bella gero, si volueris. I expect none of my shortcomings to be o'erlooked as it happens that I hath set all of them into Acherontem irremeabilem as if to face that prodigiosa vides Tenedae tormenta securis of thy censure, even to parasitos faciat, quae usque attondeant. sed me una turbat res ratioque, Apoecidi; whilst I've set myself down for tibimet invigila, nam foeliciter ille sapit, qui alieno sapit periculo, to observe this world from a privation. To observe ignotus tineas inertes, [Libellus Gebensis. P. 29.] or indulge thine own eyes unto all the world's confusion, vidi ego me propter ruptos telluris hiatus, nec subii; uidi exanimum fecique nocentem Tydea; me Tegee regem indefensa reposcit, orbaque Parrhasiis ululat mihi mater in antris-- to see the world yawn and gape on thy own account, is to dwell wholly alone; nec rhombos ideo libertis ponere lautus, nec tenuis sollers turdarum nosse salivas. messe tenus propria vive et granaria, fas est, emole; quid metuis? Occa, et seges altera in herba est. Or as thou watch thereof as the whole world is caught up in it's abject businesses, to till thine own and from thine own expect of nothing more. 160. You shall never know the sheer indulgence of reason, if you cannot set yourself upon a single point, even like Themis, the blind goddess of justice. 161. One proverb may even retrieve another in caliginoso carceri, just as the fire of the blood quencheth the fire of wisdom, which is cast like unto water and is but a whisper- tis' to be herein remanded; somnus frena regens tacito voluebat sidera. [Jacobus, Magdalius: Aerarium aureum poetarum] Terrestri crassa grabato tardant fatalem membrorum pondera somnum, nor will caecas grave olentis Averni afford much displeasure unto dreams; wherein the longueur of that sense might sigh unto the ghost of henbane. 162. If the mercy of God were as closely apprehended as the pity of man, then it surely were to be an Ignatius but to live; and unto such as believe that there is nothing but a great Lethe after death, than surely being forgotten were more than the oblivion of the record of human names, wherein to die were surely more than death. 163. Minervam nec nemoris muti iunxisse carentia sensu robora, sed caeso Tomari Iovis augure luco arbore praesaga tabulas animasse loquaces, for some prefer their book as like unto some speaking forest; some keep them more strictly, pinge globum tenui quem libratum undique filo sustineat summi numinis alta manus. 164. Therefor go and write thy books, just as much as I may impute quid proderat ditasse Paelignas anus uelociusue miscuisse toxicum for one hath drunken from this knowledge of man of which one knoweth not what the name of the precious wine is, is it oenomel, or is it Samosian? One does not even ask the important question, does it bear the spices of Keres? But one would, like a good Socrates, learn how to choose one's own fate, and call their choice knowledge! 165. There are gentle philosophers with a certain penury of spirit, who know no other way to express their deepest devotion and love than to offer their truth and sense of foolishness. Yet our truth is so very precious, and even more so our sense of foolishness! And often the gift which these are made into is accepted without incurring as profound an obligation as the donors, the philosopher, supposes. Herein the lie which a philosopher may be dealt should become a blandis taedia mille jocis, [Gamelion ac Eruditione Ornatissimi ... Sponsi: Nec non Lectissimae ... Elizabetae ..Tidemanni Gisii ] the tedious flattery of so many jokes: and the lie will urge his truth to sing unto the ears of his foolishness, and his cheeks will turn red. Is it not funny that the names of things are more important than what things are? Perhaps the philosopher should find love enough to contradict, to even make new names sanae quicquam reliquue est in corpore mentis, [Elegiae hodoiporikai V Ioachimi Camerarii]: then perhaps he will have the foresight to anticipate what those things really are! 166. Thus does man answer himself with regard to the riddle of vengeance, which is really the element of degeneration, in the sigh of the moral instinct of the Jewish peoples. "As it has accorded unto me," he says to himself, "so must it accord unto everyone in whom distinction seeks to embody itself and to claim in this world the worth to create destinies, to create a Chosen peoples, and to banish." The secret power and necessity of this anagnorisis will operate in and upon the destined individual like a furor uterninus 1 and tantillum cupidus via vorabit- [Paulus Mellisus Schedius.] long before he has had the distinction itself in view and has known its name. No, but revenge is not so worthy! It is regarded, alterius tepida colluvione bibam, a draught to our beard, let alone Anacharis's fouth glass. Let us therefor rename the spirit of revenge the spirit of distinctions. 167. Even commandments involve a secret antagony, that of the moral, the questioning self. 'Thou shalt!' is met with 'Shalt I?' Yes... It is precisely therein, that it finds its power. 168. The Cynic denies trust to himself, the adulteress does so only to the man she loves. 169. The most grievous thing the poet can say to the musician is: "Could I ask the name of this piece?" 170. I do not trust the abilities of many poets, but rather perceive a kind of dumb virtuosity in them. 171. Many a poet succeeds as one of the great, simply because his memory is too perfect. 172. Arrogance, a fortiori, is one of the most effective ways of keeping people at a distance. After all, I have found that it is one of the most convincing of all masks. 173. You would understand the beast by relating yourself to it? You would assure yourself that it indeed has a certain dignity, by reminding yourself that, for instance, you both drink and eat, and thus you both find offensive this and that, or what is pleasurable; you both know pain, and thus you may hold the suffering beast in your arms, and be assured that something there, that is more than teeth and claws. Ha! But that will only welcome the beast to look back into you, and reveal the most lyrical, humorous, terrible, the most unintelligent sensibilities in you. And none of that denotes what animal existence really is. 174. Yet, lantiqui promisit Nestoris annos ut renet tecum natus et ipse senex: promised the years of Nestor, thou hadst yet any wisdom gained in thy books.Wherefor thou Wisdom! So thou hadst written thine self in thy vessel of our books, non parva comas evinxit oliva: concisum argentum in titulos, inscriptaque vasa praemia victorum statuunt; oraque pinxit mir virum, jussitque suis prostare senestris institor, et grandes mirantur compita suras; that thee mayst place thine wears before all of this thine publick, in the seat of philosophy, or have thy whole pantomimi chorum serve to its guests an excellency of books, awaiting to be given the dregs of cariosae fragmine cupae themselvest, until the philosopher lives, ut memorant, non invidiosa nefandis nec cupienda bonis regna Thoantis erant. hic pro supposita virgo Pelopeia cerva sacra deae coluit qualiacumque suae, wherein neither the evil envy nor the good desireth, that nectebant flavis gestamen aristis agricolae, solitoque rubens in palmite bacchis; paxque sua laetam fulgens ornabat oliva, thou shouldest be content with feeding all daye on thy piteous olive, forthwith to be secured thy peace and thine property. [Johannidos, Flavius Cresconius Corippus. P. 60.] Lest he hath all the world of an oxen open unto him, or goeth to saye, nulla est sapientia major, spernere quam fulvum toto de corde metallum atque suas aliis meritas concedere laudes, and not without contorta suo non prodidit ullum indicio, elinguem reddidit Iphicrates: I must bear my censure, play the part of the beast without a tounge, wherefor cui non certaverit ulla aut tantum fluere aut totidem durare per annos, no grape canst vie for gust of wine juice. Mine reader might safely inquireth, bucera secla effodient pedibus glebas: for I am so just as hath I read, so wise as I hath read. Pani coniferie pinus, sua vitis Iacco, clavigero placeat populus alta deo, a Iove principium Musae, Iovis arbore gaudent: though e'en the muses hath their beginning in Jove, for any adequate fleshment, I fancy this, thou canst fancy whatever it is that thou want, I am no worse off to hath given this admission, for I presume not unto the works of a magician, who must needs conceal any trickery, lest his act be the less convincing: let that thine excavation carryeth out of this booke strange herbs, or hints of garlic; I am happy to forfeit gold, I hath no audience, that wherewith I wouldest try the juvenile sun in the Chaldean house, or to read in some secrets of nature what thee thy self cannot read. Servus est e Caria, quemad modum Execestides, avos sibi procreet apud nos, et invenientur ipsi gentiles, hatch thy proper pedigree, no longer to be a Carian servant, or might ask why I, tales et barbara Thracia montes olim habuisse dolet, sed Dacia gaudet habere. quod labor hic hominum magno molimine praestat; Gryphum rostra brevi peragunt facilique labore. Horum igitur gazas, non nidos, credit avara gens Arimasporum, nec opinio fallit inanis, would play the part of the bird that eateth it's own eggs, and write as I hitherto openly confess: I hath given thee to an inflamed insperatum auxillium, a picture without hope. And as to why I wouldest demure mine own favorite authors, I taketh after the wealth of the nest: likely this is me, that is more then canst be said about some authors. I will imagine that I have no audience, nor have I my own Illisus to meet my own beautiful Phaedrus; and it was not so uncommon for me to divagate, or to question what the world was in himself, if he is (letteth Pallenginus Stellatus give us the term) mundus stultorum cavea, or is after all a hollow cave: a dream, or is even a sort of theatre, wherefor to behold this our unworthy forbears and captains, I hath so been placed thereunto, if I mayst elicit a phrase from Samuel Rogers, by the "Instructors of my youth! Who first unveil'd the hallow'd form of Truth," whereafter I thenceforth discover that wisdom is so full of pity that we pay for it with much pain. 175. As concerns revenge, I hath not examined beyond the fact that he whom fears from near at hand fears often less of Adromache, and this would be a simple enough answer to it; though I would now insert a passage of Sophocles: my sufferings past I could forget; but oh! I dread the woes to come; for well I know when once the mind's corrupted it brings forth unnumbered crimes, and ills to ills succeed. For if we let this delicious fault to spread, sed talis Thrasos catuli immerso brachio linguae extirparet fibras, quin et Getuli iugulum leonis rumperet, quotquot Thermodoon alias Amazonas aluit nostro supprimerem iugo, I would like to pull a tongue out by it's root. Olenius Tydeus (fraterni sanguinis illum conscius horror agit) ora comasque gerens subit uno tegmine, cuius fusus humo gelida partem prior hospes habebat, for whenever I begin to hold another man under the judgment of my own tounge, I remind myself that we art strangers of a self same shelter, so none are really enemies under this our theatre, and again we canst not hold the world itself against us, unless we sing unto the ears of our revenge: yet none of our despicable humors becomes anything less then a glutton o'er revenge. My vengeance rangest til' mine thoughts art like the labor of so many anvils being hammered, when, as Cinesias saith in Aristophanes, what time we've wasted we might have drenched with Paphian laughter, flung on Aphrodite's Mysteries. So every Argo must have it's Planctae, every summer it's wasps. The relief of one fortune, to another is but pensare legumine panem, or the distributor of a few beans; inquit ille satyrus noster, nigroque simillima cygno, to hath painted a swan black, quod viret et molles imitatur rupibus herbas; hic Nomadum lucent flaventia saxa Thasosque et Chios et gaudens fluctus spectare Carystos, or to even be that glass which ungulates in color as doth the sea. 176. On the other hand, a riverine and brutal nature never seeks for clemency but always only his Arethusa.What are the voices of his love? It is certainly as difficult to say as Clymene narrabat inanem Vulcani Martisque dolos et dulcia furta, aque Chao densos divum numerabat amores or enumerating the affairs of the gods. 177. Man comes to his most terrible realization yet: perhaps he has confused his greatest good with his severest evil, maybe what he calls love is yet the spirit of his revenge, the spirit of distinctions. 178. Almost every lover knows, at one stage of his development, the "Zopyrian existence," one in we should put out our eyes and burn our lyres for the sake of beauty, of the beautiful. This is no guarded secret: or albae rara senectae, the rarer honey of old age, or as subtle cheeks kept behind pergit caerulei vitreas ad Thybridis aedes, non galea conclusa genas, with latebricolarum hominum corruptor, or the promises of love, Panthoides Euphorbus eram, cui pectore quondam haesit in adverso gravis hasta minoris Atridae; cognovi clipeum, laevae gestamina nostrae, nuper Abanteis templo Iunonis in Argi, that tameth us with the confidence of a woman's illsome bribes, corruptoris improbitas ipsos audet temptare parentes: tanta in muneribus fiducia. Nullus ephebum deformem saeua castrauit in arce tyrannus, nec praetextatum rapuit Nero loripedem nec strumosum atque utero pariter gibboque tumentem; to avert the naive fervency of men against themselves, and thereby to their own use, neither does it satisfy us to sup on either roots or bark, whereafter the benign Ceres twas' unknown to us, lest we beholdeth in Jupiter's fane our former shield, and take upon to loving woman after we have discovered their frustra Thiadesque, Tigresque, silenumque oculis. But from this 'Zopyrian existence' springs up a desperate and unaquit passion that, nonetheless, is not registered as pain, bearing no usual salt for the old wound of solitude- a wound in which formerly all pains were interpreted by the great lover as healing salts. Zopyrus- the form of pre-existence of every Orpheus and every Thamyris. 179. Credis me potuisse meae maledicere vitae ambobus mihi quae carior est oculis?- It is this question that is the first to be put to the lover- as a test of conscience. 180. Credere, pastores, levibus nolite puellis; Phyllida Mopsus habet, Lycidan habet ultima rerum: eros can only endure in the extremity of despair and destitution; it needs this absurdity in order not to fall victim to the objective madness, poros. The capacity for love amounts to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers itself as the object of some love as yet inaccessible to it in the moment of abandonment itself; just as the children of Medea who, in giving themselves over to their mother as instruments of her revenge, find in her the semblance of a love as yet inaccessible to them, but which nonetheless they are compelled to accede for no other reason than, by virtue of the sheer grotesquery of their mother's thought, they could not absorb her injustice. Excess of love is alone the proof of love: that is the most foreboding lesson, which we should take from Medea's children. 181. Even the blooming vine lies the moment that its flower is seen without 'O caecitatem immensame. O atram ingeniorum calignem.' [Laguna's Europa Heauten Timorumene] Even the innocent appreciation of a young girl becomes an excuse for an existence outrageously perverse, and there is no longer love except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in the unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of truly loving, even if that may be illusory. This malignant deeper meaning of levity, canis festinas, caecos parit catulos, [Johannes Sinapius in Adversus Ignavium, Et Sordes Eorum sint De Pane Lucrando] should call back to diffidence every act of spontaneity and self abandonment, for such impetuosity implies pliancy towards the superior Apollonian image of the 'beauty of illusion.' 182. Why are the old religions so ridiculous to us? It is not because we have grown more reasonable, surely- but merely on account of their rigorous purity, which is juxtaposed with the pure rigor of modern science and philosophy. 183. Even with fear, the genuine warrior always feels something higher than fear. 184. The deeper we dive, the smaller we appear to all surface-dwellers. So small shall we become! Until we are not even regarded as- shallow. 185. One must have wit, but not ever allow himself to take notice of it or pride himself upon it- that will preserve the form of irony. Otherwise wisdom shall degenerate into epigrams, the Callimachian style of wit. 186. Death. -- Who, on seeing man compose his idea of death as a regression upon inanimate matter, and on the other hand- as in the language of his religious, as the absolution of mere matter, as an ultimate death, would not believe that he has a clear comprehension of this compound, this two-fold idea? It is nevertheless the thing that he comprehends the least. Man is to himself the most marvelous object of nature; for he is unable to conceive death as a regression into inanimate nature, and still less what death as a rigidification and absolution of mere being is, and least of all how the inanimate world, the world of elements in which he is endured and dissolved in death, can be joined with a second, timeless and absolute world in the ultimate death of an absolution of being. This is the climax of his difficulties, and yet it is his own being: 187. Guilt is not a shameful memory held fast but the ironic return of something that had been morally pretermitted or overlooked, or whose moral implications had not been drawn at the time of the act. 188. Just as the Greeks were the only culture that was truly a culture, so our society is the first genuine society. 189. It is no modest goal to wake: for that purpose you must stay asleep for an entire night. 189. Diastrophism is the universal form of tragedy. 190. Even the bellum omne contra natura has been purified- by democracy. 191. The man who still rejoices in solitude is not triumphing over his loneliness but over the fact that the loneliness is not precisely the loneliness he expected. 090720 ... Ascolo Parodites BOOK 5 "Iterum ille eam rem judicatam judicat majoreque mulcta mulctat." - Plautus 192. Unto man all speech is in vain. There the consultation of physicians is the best wisdom. Let folk ring the bells of physicians -- the physicians in the apothecary will outring them with the clanging of their pennies. 193. Faith often makes a liar of the most honest of men and of the liar an honest man. 194. You shall only be frightened, tried, and overburdened with the path of eternity- when you take it uphill. 195. To extenuate ones aesthetic- that is the ladder at the end of which one also extenuates his life. 196. 'I have been injured,' says the conscience. 'It is impossible for me to have been injured,' says envy, and remains incorrigible. Eventually, the conscience yields: but even this struggle is precisely mentis inops, a delusion of envy. 197. I flaunteth, thou covereth thy eyes. It is only when our pride performs badly, that a spectator is disposed to envy us. 198. A woman who knows that she is beautiful, but out of her conceit does not allow herself to be moved by anything beautiful outside of herself, betrays her miasma: [ an unwholesome atmosphere] all of the faults that we would otherwise overlook in her descend and return to her ground and fore: nihil in robustam sapientia mentem sirenes omnes posse. [... Democritum me putate, & tacita saltem cachinni censura mollissimos pros -- Erycius in Comus, Phagesiposia Cimmeria] 199. He who is a good listener takes things in jest only in relation to the speaker: more importantly, the same rule he applies to himself, so that he knows exactly when to leave a conversation. 200. The value of knowledge-- is not that the 'ante ferit, quam flamma micet' of morals in the first place? 201. The charm of wisdom would be a mere nugae canorae, were it not that so much of our pity spoils on the long trek towards it. 202. If a woman genuinely possesses elegance, this simply means that she keeps with always her typical ambitions- and also the means to fulfilling them. 203. The nature of a man's courtship descends into the lowest chambers of his spirit, and determines it- for a man courts with even his shames and miseries. 204. Solitary men become risible precisely by what disgusts and makes others uncomfortable-- by everything which speaks to the inner life, which speaks to the things we do only when we are alone, commonly the objects of shame, the 'obscene.' Yet their little alienis mensibus aestas may be seen to bring a greater relief to them than the most mirthful summers. 205. Cum prima tentant praelia. [Marullus, Michael Tarchaniota: Epigrammata et Hymni. P. 49] One may only trust a deeply saracastic individual in moments of great humiliation: either of their own or of the sarcastic person. 206. It is the destiny of the human creature, that soon or a later every instinct will enounter its ennui- its truth. 207. One seeks a Cephissus for his shames, so that he may make them appear to be mere weaknesses: so that he may not betray himself of his desires in the way he talks, behaves, etc. around his partner, the other is just gracious enough to have no qualms over taking advantage of a weak creature: a successful affair thus originates. 208. De non apparentibus, et non existentibus, eadem est ratio. The woman learns how to forgive a man in proportion as she- forgets what to expect of him. The riddle of woman-- what then is left to forgive? 209. Coelo adsimilis hominum fortuna videtur, nanque vices mutat, facieque est saepe serena. [Vadianus Joachim in Helvetii Aegloga] All philosophers suffer from the same deficiency, in that they think they can arrive at their goal of an honest and genuine life by analyzing their ideals, of 'truth,' 'justice,' or even more questionable- beauty. Instinctively they let their ideals hover before them as a laureum baculum gesto, a proof against all dangers, and a precaution against all spiritual corruptions. Yet, in precisely as this holds, it will be easy enough to make out the fact- that these noble 'analyses' of life are mere philosophical justifications of particular ways of living, philosophical confessions of particular ways of experiencing or receiving- life: like great suns do these ideals bestow verdure and solace, and do they relieve one of his dependence upon guilt and shame, or with a noble 'ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?' are all mortifications and disgrace even permitted to lay down unto the summer's flowerbeds. 210. Temptation sets bounds even to love. 211. Woman has hitherto been treated by men like butterflies, which, in their haphazard search for nectar, have come amidst them from an entirely different way of life: more delicate, gay, fragile, and sweet, where labor and toil are naturally absent-- but as something also which, though it may set to rest right upon your very hand, nonetheless can neither be touched or grasped. Prey that it comes to rest upon your hand, and when it does- hold your breath! 212. You can discover what a man genuinely desires by the means he uses to flatter you. Consequently- his baseness. 213. Every deep thinker is more afraid of being loved than of being neglected. The latter perhaps strikes his amour propre lame, and it may yet live for a number of years even with a limp-- but the former strikes his courage lame, his courage to live alone, to think, and like a noble horse, it must thereafter perish. 214. Lessons from childhood. All aestheticism begins in forgetfulness. What? Are all beauties- objects of the memory? 215. When the land is flooded one forgets even the hunt. Yes- but one recovers his food amongst the drowning beasts. 216. In the background of all their personal naivete, poets themselves still have their great, impersonal humor- for 'poetry.' 217. A rule for the lover: with respect to woman, insofar as she is out and about, or around her friends most especially- never assume you are being shown something. Always assume that you are merely observing this part in her hair, this exposed shoulder, this fold in her dress. 218. From a sermon. -- Possessed with the spirit of god, a member of the congress cries out: my good preacher, I have proclaimed for so long and so furiously that I have gone hoarse- I could not utter, much less sing, another word. The preacher answers him with his shame: Good! Then our God stands glorified. For now we may at last cease proclaiming his 'works!' 219. Beware: for he whom suffers you to censure him, there is nothing new you can teach him. 220. Reason immediately evaporates from all transient experiences and feeling- from all which, like insects, pass away in the course of a breath, so that its rational origins become improbable. After all, does not every scientific account of our origins, seem contradictory and ridiculous to our feelings? What? Has metaphysics survived on the basis of this mere antipathy to feelings? 221. For an artist to pretend to understand women- that is bad style; for him really to understand them it is a bad soul. 222. The eye of renunciation declares: "I watched for a mendicant and saw only those content to eat my scraps." 223. The danger in loneliness-- "All women now are beatified for me, I now love every atropos- which pretty girl now would like to be my atropos?" 224. There is an innocence in profound hatred of men: it is possessed by that solitary and lonesome man to whom it has not occurred, because he has not yet grown lonesome enough, has not spent quite enough time in solitude, that he is at the liberty to hate himself. 225. Even the least envious amongst us is still vain enough to envy in another what he has already attained himself. 226. What a person truly believes only begins to betray itself when his spirits, his happiness, decline- when he ceases to show to what degree he is willing to 'believe:' in the midst of great trial, when the esteem of his friends and family which he has earned by adopting those beliefs loses all significance. 227. Rule for diplomats. -- Nobility means to have re-discovered the dignity and innocent smile one, as a child, would present while being scolded for wrong doing. 228. The sense of comedy ebbs and flows with apprehension. A great witticism is but the ebb of a great tide of apprehensions: laughter breaks upon this crest. 229. That need for remorse which precedes a wrongdoing, in a tragic genius, seems almost laughable- like tender hands upon a Lamia. For it actually creates it. 230. Alcestis. -- It is only in receiving a gift that man is more humane than woman. 231. To praise a moralist for what he is lacking in, is a way of reprimanding him without the fear of provoking his conscience, that would deafen him to any censure. 232. One will rarely feel himself knowing if grand insights be ascribed to grace, ordinary insights to simple gestation, and lurid insights to the observation of personal vice... to psychology. 233. It is easy enough to become a despiser of truth. Merely share the truth with other men. 234. Ecnephia covereth a great many wells, and causes much thirst; but she also revealeth man secrets and hidden passages; verily, she upraiseth tombs and monuments alike. Guilt transforms us, it does what all medicine does that does not merely preserve: (as the physician knows) this is the essence of the Tragic genius and the riddle of all contradictions of Christian morality-- the riddle of 'redemption.' But in our ground, there is something genuinely unforgiveable, some igneum of spiritual fate, [kairos] some little scienza e pazzia of predetermined decision and answer to the call and apprehension of certain courses of action, which appear to me and not to you- purely on the basis of the prefiguration of moral sensibilities. 235. Whoever is fundamentally a philosopher takes all things gravely only in relation to what can be endured- even himself. 236. From the Tomb of Orpheus, upon a bed of roses, a black lute is made; grape vines were given it as strings. Alas, how blissfully thou singest-- my truths, as sweet as Eurydice, so restless as Orpheus, upon the black lute. I hear you sing: then did I wake to love in pain, then I gave my soul to the longing and the dreaming seas. Alas, how blissfully thou singest, so sweet as Eurydice, as restless as Orpheus. "Eurydice," said Orpheus, "You are a sacred night: I have lost my center in you, I have no direction. Eurydice answered: "Rather are you a sacred night unto me, and it is not you that are lost but I- whom have lost fixity. All philosophers shall perish by me; that is my deepest forgiveness for you, that I destroy you." 237. Hypochondria. -- Let us inquire into the mother of invention. A lucrative apothecary has always need of a symptom- or he has to himself become a symptom occasionally. 238. From Horace. One may indeed speak the truth- but with the accompanying smile one nevertheless tells a lie. But only a women could accomplish this thaumaturgy. For only a woman is capable of being impersonal with the truth. 239. What makes one a great comic? - At the same time, to retreat from ones highest enjoyment and greatest shame. 240. If a woman was not so disposed to shame- we would often be forced to put her to death. 241. In the absence of women. -- A peacock does not envy his fellow peacock's feather, no matter how beautiful it is. 242. It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain empathy by passing through its opposite- pity and disgust: consequently everything is pathology, even empathy. 243. What cause for jubilations! What music for the unaquit! -- Only one love is impossible in the infinite sense-- self-love. 244. The life of man is too long for our love: the life of beasts too short for our attachment. 245. A half-truth is often more comforting and sensual than a truth and more shameless than a falsehood. 246. A great deal of our curiosity for woman may be accounted for with the fact: that in every new experience she is like unto a little bird who spent its life in a little cage, and was suddenly hurled into the open sky. Thus- she jumps around a lot and turns somersaults in the air. 247. Most of the vice in pride lies simply in the fact that it must be renewed constantly. 248. There is no such thing as a heroic act- but only the heroism of a moral interpretation of the act. 249. The man that cannot cross the distance which separates him from his woman, lives more immodestly than the man without a woman. 250. The aegis of self-pity may protect one against the furies and the throws of fortune, against the tragedies of life- but not against the pinpricks of men. 251. Maenads-- A purely intellectual curiosity, as opposed to one owing merely to personal vanity, in a woman is rare- but in a group of woman, especially when they have been provoked by a lone man that has wondered by accident into their midst, to become the object of their amusement, it is the rule. 252. 'Principle' for argumentation. -- If a moralist has shame, we should take leave from argument with him: for if a moralist is shameless- he will take leave from us. 253. Not how one soul revolts at another but in how it comes closer shows me to what extent they are enemies for each other. 254. There is an accumulative vanity in a number of women, though none in particular are prideful. 255. What is the meaning of this? If one desires to sleep he does not reminisce: he makes plans for the next day. 256. One must be a either a great historian or a god to be able to tell apart catastrophes and blessings, without causing a catastrophe. 257. Ars Saltandi. -- One must pay dearly for his omniscience; to enjoy one beauty he has to ignore several horrible things. 258. The mother of invention is not desire- but desirelessness. 259. One finds another man's pride endurable not when it accords to his patience, but to his pride. 260. It is the pointed word which bringeth on a storm: a dull arrow is useless no matter how well it is shot. 261. My taste knows more about the consciousness of a moralist than his consciousness knows of my taste. 262. We only envy a writer when he says something with which we find ourselves in agreement. -- For that is the only thing that we cannot steal from him. 263. Tact in immorality consists in being weary of going beyond the mark- not in failing to attain it. 264. Tragic paradox of free-thinking: the mediocre philosophers who alone make the exercise of thought possible cannot gurantee its duration. 265. One who lives for the sake of making an image for himself sees to it that the image is never completed. 266. You have fell into the back of the herd? Are you doing it as a wolf? Or because you are wounded? A third case would be- the wolf has found you. 267. Iconoclasm consolidates rituals by the sacred fear which it inspires. 268. I am moral only above or beneath myself, in temptation or prostration; on the level of my habitual existence I am unaware that I exist. This lack of awareness is called 'sin.' 269. Our aversion to blood may be so terrible that we are prevented from- doctoring our wounds. 270. Danger in aphorisms. -- A thought, until it is the truth, is a mere melody, with beginning and end: and once it is the truth it is inaudible- as the motions of the stars and planets, the music of the spheres. 271. Sickness saves one from turgidity and thereby also from the effrontery, the shamelessness in knowledge by which the philosopher demeans and extenuates himself. For this reason, sickness may be taken as a precondition for the writing of aphorisms. 272. Almost every man feels comfortable speaking well of his intentions: yet the man who is comfortable with speaking well of his reasons is called 'prideful.' Once more, a man who is not comfortable with speaking well of his reasons- is called indecisive. 273. I have done that!- Sayeth my virtue. I am incapable of it!- So sayeth my vice. Eventually my vice learns the art of flattery- and I become a hypocrite. 274. Some Philomelas have an art for hiding their tapestries from all eyes and call it their- INNOCENCE. 275. Even the most courageous amongst us often exhibits cowardice in face of what he has already endured- yea, thereby we have invented punishment. 276. In irony there is no love of the asinine but precisely on that account a great deal too much mercy for them. 277. On the shamelessness of philosophers. -- Being unable to sanitize knowledge, we have demeaned it and made of knowledge a mere means to sanitation. 278. 279. 280. Theodicy is more dishonourable towards God than any evil-doer: it supposes that he DESERVES to be vindicated. 281. We are forbidden of becoming devils through other peoples virtues. 282. Love, with respect to women, is in truth neither a passion or a madness, but an art. Its success consists in abandoning the nothingness of boredom for the dynamism of remorse- at will. 283. The most important value- the value of the effort we put in a thing, is precisely the last value to be realized. 284. Courage is the mysticism of duty. 285. Has woman ever been understood? No, the feminine philosophers have no psychological depth, and the psychologically keen-sighted are far from feminine. 286. A nation can never become successful in matters of politics or in military affairs without a prominent father-figure at its center. Also, a nation a nation can never become a military or political failure WITHOUT a prominent father figure at its center. 287. Most people are far too much occupied with the esteem of others to be vain. 288. Temptation only appears in the consciousness that has already overcome a temptation. 289. Lacking morality, - many feelings tend to disappear. 290. A person who opened himself too early to guilt can never turn away from it; this is a wound that becomes like a stomach through which one digests all of his experiences. 291.Guilt is not excess of moral sensibility. It is the possession of idees fixes as to how one shall mitigate one's moral sensibilities in the face of shameful acts. 292. Heaven is a noble table for dice-throwing. Morality has only one real charm- the charm of gambling. But what if we do not care if we win or lose? 293. There is so much morality upon the earth and yet there is nothing more rare than a value! This is due to the vast quantity of ruins, tendencies, and impulses in all works of morality heretofor. Morality decomposes all creation, all value; this is its unique impulse-- and with the spiritual fundus accrued and disposed in conformity to a law whose origins one cannot find, except in the remotest most depths of the soul, it establishes a new world- it creates the sensation of newness (this is called revelation in theological terms) or the awe without which the reception of any new ideal, any new value, is incomprehensible. Morality, the puissance terrible become genius. 294. Principle of refugium. -- What if morality was really a climate changing idea that reinforced itself with a paleoclimatological effect so that even what is forgotten and what was no more, was effortlessly made so? 295. Longing produces a nervousness like that of entering a yawning chasm, and this nervousness is infinite. Consequently, the normal psychological process of converting anxiety into energy, the creation of nervous energy, cannot be completed in longing. 296. It is always easier to love when one lacks any trace whatsoever- of hysteria. 297. The starry firmament as the secret chamber in which Erebus, the god of chaos, and Apollo, the god of music, settle their ancient quarrel. 298. You philosophize first to combat the paranoia of silence, then the deafening of chatter, and finally everything that is not philosophy. 299. That anyone can accept the truth is the sad key to the lock that is almost always absent. This is proved by everything that truth does not open. 300. On the Aristocracy. -- It seems that a precondition of nobility is an offended taste. 301. Courage, solely with respect to a truth that is utterly known, is a clumsy cupbearer that breaks the cup while filling it with wine. 090720 ... Ascolo Parodites 302. Sadness and sin... Why is it that in addition to the one we desire the other? For what could one add to other? The essential pathos of guilt. 303. Politics- the compulsion to create rules and to create rules to break. An essential characteristic of children at play. 304. Fleeting passions are not strictly irrational, but invalid. A state of the soul is not valid unless it adopts its own internal form by creating a necessary space for itself to thrive- within something external, pace dialectica, or transforms the soul according to its own nature. In all valid states of the soul there is therefor a close correspondence between internality and externality: although it should suffice simply for the beloved to look into the face of the enthralled man to grasp in complete detail all of the elements of his innter tension, he must confess his desire to the beloved before it can be understood and thus returned to him, although in a form less poignant than his tormented, his longing gaze. 090721 ... Ascolo Parodites The moralist finds more grass in the many dales of shame than on the arrid heights of innocence, chastity, purity. Maritimi mores.-- In morals, we do not owe the conscience any apologies for torturing her- but rather for ignoring her. 090721 what's it to you? who go blather from