the_apologoumena Ascolo Parodites THE APOLOGOUMENA ὅσσα τ' ἐν Δελφοι̂σιν ἀριστεύσατε ἠδὲ χόρτοις ἐν λέοντος*, δηρίομαι πολέσιν περὶ πλήθει καλω̂ν, ὡς μὰν σαφὲς οὐκ ἂν εἰδείην λέγειν ποντια̂ν ψάφων ἀριθμόν*. ἕπεται* δ' ἐν ἑκάστῳ μέτρον: νοη̂σαι* δὲ καιρὸς ἄριστος. - Pindar, Olympian Odes. οἵτινες ἐνδείκνυνται τὸ ἔργον τοῦ νόμου γραπτὸν ἐν ταῖς καρδίαις αὐτῶν, συνμαρτυρούσης αὐτῶν τῆς συνειδήσεως καὶ μεταξὺ ἀλλήλων τῶν λογισμῶν κατηγορούντων ἢ καὶ ἀπολογουμένων - Romans 2:15 --------------------------------- So as the psalm is the oldest aesthetic, so were Delphi the earliest philosophy, and the first knowledge--piety. What is more certain than the end of man, and of what other truth then sin is there a more general and better attested knowledge? Nevertheless there is no man wise enough to believe it except the one who, as in the prayer of Moses, is taught by God to number his own days. Socrates! You bear your name, yet you require no proof of your existence; for you words were found, and they were eaten; 1 Sophists were bought in the wages of wickedness, but they were rebuked by you as though by Balaam's talking ass. 2 You get honor, but know ye not of fame; for you have neither concept nor sympathy thereof. 3 You find faith, but recognize no miracles. Neither are you a human, yet you must be an image of a man which superstition has made a god. Your ears they do not hear, your eyes they do not see. You surely know everything, and learn nothing; therefor your judgment is without understanding. Delphi were not before the luck of astrologers. 4 But analogy was the soul of your reasoning, and the body of it,- irony. For because language is but the conveyance of knowledge, and you wear the characters of human ignorance and curiosity, therefor have you not rendered your body to baptism; do you speak before the tongue, having not rendered your tongue unto judgment. 5 You expose in providence the diligent, you expose in indignation artifice, - In Epimetheo hoc non erat, ut providendo adhiberet diligentiam, sed sera con sideratio & ut facti cum poeniteret, inerat. [Ioachimi Camerarii Libellus gnomologicus] 6 Blind pagans have recognized the invisibility that the human being shares with God. 8 The covering of the body, the countenance of the head, the extremities of the arms are the visible habit and illatabilem locum in which we walk; but are actually nothing but an index of the secret which we hold within us -- vita privatus. [Hieroclis Alexandrini Commentarius in Aurea Carmina Pythagoream. P. 183-187] Thus, the importance and salience of the passions, and of the human interests, are visibly extended into all our activity: such as our propensity to appropriate what is universal, or remote, and apply it to ourselves, and to contrariwise extend our personal experience over the whole of the human world, to portray everything as similar to ourselves and to spread our portrait over the whole of nature in veritas moralis. [Compendium philosophiæ ad usum seminariorum, auctore Sti Sulpitii, page 23.] 7 Human passions are the predictable driving mechanism of the creature - that is the final item in the inventory of knowledge which had to transform the dynamism of world-history into political action. 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. 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 hath revealed himself to the creature through the creature. Thus God is even mirrored in his works, in proof of a miracle of such infinite silence, that maketh God as nothing before the creation in igne igne vetat excitari, -- [Schottenius, Hermann: Colloqvia Philosophica, & consolatoria, ac exhortatoria] that one must in conscience deny his existence or be a beast; but at the same time of such immutability, that fulfills all in all, that one cannot flee from his ardent solicitude. Our Philosophy would needs take another form, if one studied the fate of this word: Philosophy; by heads, races, and peoples, according to the bowery of the times, - not as a philosopher ones self, but as the painter who steps back, to admire their Olympian games. The Poet at the beginning of days is the same as the thief at the end of days; therefor Adam might have read verses unto Methusselah, and Methesselah unto Noah, and Noah unto the days of the Son of Man. Whilst the world was early bad, and while the Earth before the seventh day were still a Chaos, the first sin was the most deplorable of any, and a Phrygian like Aesop taketh time to grow wise. Thus the youngest impieties were surely of the keenest dyestuff, and overwhelmed their memories with themselves; and, shutting up the first windows of Time, left no history of those longevous generations, where men might have been properly historians. The Love of the Spirit sinneth against the conscience methinks as much as the animal love does against the eye and the supposed flesh. In thy self be substantially great, and in virtue more than thou appearest unto others, who, in their vice, have been deceived in Heaven. Think not thine own shadow longer than that of others, or before the seminal of your fathers; nor delight to take the apogeum of thyself. If you needs offereth a consolation before the length of Elihu, then do not fall short of the concern of Socrates. Look not for victuals in the Euxine Sea, nor for the majesty of hospitable waters; neither seek profundity in shallowness, nor great fortune in slight occasions. Though methinks Pygmalion would not have gotten his Phocensian victory, if he would have been given the patience of Diogenes who made orations unto statues, and taught to rely upon silent and dumb rememberances, rather then to foster hope in the characters of good things without rendering assuefactions unto them, and to preserve the intuitions which love had placed upon him from the imminuition of his art. In every clime we are with Meroian shadows cast upon Antiscian states, and with our light cometh our shadows and darkness to walk beside us. Place not the expectation of great happiness or patient felicity here below, nor hope with Heaven to crown the Earth basileus; wherein our contentments stand upon the tops of pyramids, and the greater insecurity of their enjoyments abrupteth our serenitudes. Get thee an Arimaspus eye upon the characters of good things, nor lookest thee upon opprobrious affairs till thou overlookest them. Many are too early old, and before the date of their endedasmenae. Adversity lengtheneth our days, and Time makes no Atropos unto our sorrows; in the long habit of our living which cheateth us into the indispostion for dying, whereof we set to chew as upon mastic. Men live only by hyperbole and trope, and pass from one sleep unto another. But to learn from the story of Tiresias, who was blind upon the Earth, yet saw in his psyche or soul more than all the rest in Hell; that to die were better than to study the ways of death, were accomptable unto high virtue, and strictly the course of a Philosopher. To dissect a body or an event down to it's first elements is to want to trap God's invisible being, his divinity, and very sui generis. Thus, as Meister Eckart says that Man's heart is the labor of created things, not of god, - for God dwelleth not there - are we not left, in place of Spinoza's amor intellectus dei, the intellectual love of God, a practicum intellectus dei, or practical love of God? Letteth wise men's curiosity be roused by new stars, and letteth them to bring Myrrh and Frankincense, and their Gold! - for wisdom is apart from all things, and these are more worthful to us then their magic. The analogy of the natural economies, of the plants and of the animals, is the only ladder to the anagogical knowledge of the trichotomia and spiritual economy, which quite probably alone may resolve and complete the phenomena and accuratus scientia quidem moralis of that visible and abbreviated half, - with the original metaphysic, that is the beauty of the human animal. [Antonii Genuensis: Disciplinarum metaphysicarum] The philosophers have always given truth a diffarreation, 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? Neither the pietetistical thoroughness of the Pharisee, nor the luxuriance of Sadducean poets will renew the simplici intuitio of the Spirit, which in the 'Fear of God' impelled, in the whole teleology of moral action, the Holy people of God to speak and to write. This is the compend of all Philosophy: pseude metamonia tamnoisai kulindont elpides, the heart tendeth to empty itself in traversing it's own wounds. I shall essay to have my Syon peace: the prayers of Saints can no way choose, but please. [Natures Embassie: Divine and Morall Satyres: Shepheards Tales, Both Parts ... By Richard Brathwaite] 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. 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. 1. Jeremiah 15:16 2. 2 Peter 2. 3. Timothy: But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. 4. Francesco Guicciardini, Maxims, How much luckier astrologers are than other men! By telling one truth among a hundred lies, they acquire the confidence of men, and there falsehoods are believed. Other men, by telling one lie among many true statements, lose the confidence of others, and no one believes them even when they speak the truth. 5. Francis Bacon, de augmentis scientarum, P. 188. If I have all faith so as I could remove mountains (there is power active), if I render my body to the fire (there is power passive), if I speak with the tongues of men and angels (there is knowledge, for language is but the conveyance of knowledge), all were nothing. 6. P. 221. In Epimetheo hoc non erat, ut providendo adhiberet diligentiam, sed sera con sideratio & ut facti cum poeniteret, inerat. 7. Veritas moralis, as opposed to veritas logica. For elucidation of the terminology... " Veritas logica seu cognitionis est conformitas cognitionis cum re cognita. Veritas moralis seu enuntiationis est sermonis conformitas cum cogitationibus quas sermo exprimit. Defrectus veritatis metaphysicae in aliquo ente nihil aliud est quam ejus impossibilitas; defectus veritatis logicae est error; et defectus veritatis moralis, medacium." 8. Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama P. 107-110 081016 ... The Snores But since the psalm is not the oldest aesthetic, nor Delphi not the oldest philosophy, we begin to see the merely hyperbolic nature of these far-flung, errantly presumptuous essays. 081017 ... amy really superior, man. nice work. must have taken you at least a month. you too, Snores. 081020 ... The Snores dear_amy 081020 ... . Banal observations cloaked in obfuscatory language. 090102 what's it to you? who go blather from