"in any event 'be here now' pal."
Excerpts from a letter of E.R. Eddison
It is sufficient to reflect that the main difference between earth and heaven may lie in this: that here we are slaves of Time, but there the Gods are masters.
There are no hidden meanings: no studied symbols or allegories. It is the general defect of allegory and symbolism to set up the general above the individual, the abstract above the concrete, the idea above the person. I hold the contrary: to me the value of the sunset is not that it suggests to me ideas of eternity; rather, eternity itself acquires value to me only because I have seen it (and other matters besides) in the sunset and (shall we say) in the proud pallour of Fiorinda's brow and cheeks,--even in your friend, that brutal ferocious and lionlike fox, the Vicar of Rerek [characters in the tales],--and so have foretasted its perfections.
Personality is a mystery: a mystery that darkens as we suffer our imagination to speculate upon the penetration of human personality by Divine, and vice versa. Perhaps my three pairs of lovers are, ultimately, but one pair. Perhaps you could as truly say that [they] . . . are but two persons, each at three several stages of "awakeness," as call them six separate persons.
Reason, as we have seen [in Descartes], reached a certain bed-rock, exiguous but unshakable, by means of a criticism based on creditability: it cleared away vast superfluities of baseless system and dogma by divesting itself of all beliefs that it was possible to doubt. In the same way, may it not be possible to reach a certain bed-rock among the chaos of fantasy by means of a criticism based not on credibility but on value?
No conscious being, we may suppose, is without desire; and if certain philosophies and religions have set up as their ideal of salvation and beatitude a condition of desirelessness, to be attained by an asceticism that stifles and starves every desire, this is no more than to say that those systems have in fact applied a criticism of values to dethrone all minor values, leaving only this state of blessedness which (notwithstanding their repudiation of desire) remains as (for their imagination at least) the one thing desirable. And in general, it can be said that no religion, no philosophy, no considered view of the world and human life and destiny, has ever been formulated without some affirmation, express or implied, of what is or is not to be desired; and it is this star, for ever unattained yet for ever sought, that shines through all great poetry, through all great music, painting, building, and books by men, through all noble deeds, loves, speculations, endurings and endeavors, and all the splendours of "earth and the deep sky's ornament" since history began, and that gives (at moments, shining through) divine perfection to some little living thing, some dolomite wall lighted as from within by the low red sunbeams, some skyscape, some woman's eyes.
By a procedure corresponding to that of Descartes when, by doubting all else, he reached through process of elimination something that he could not doubt, we have, after rejecting all things whose desirableness depends on their utility as instruments to ends beyond themselves, reached something desirable as an end in itself. What it is in concrete detail, is a question that may have as many answers as there are minds to frame them ("In my Father's house are many mansions"). But to deny its existence, while not a self-contradictory error palpable to reason (as is the denial of the Cartesian cogito), is to affirm the complete futility and worthlessness of the whole of Being and Becoming.
Three broad considerations may here be touched on:
It does not seem necessary to postulate a plurality of ultimate values.
No sane theory of values will ultimately square with the facts of this world as we know it "here and now." But ultimate value, as we have seen, is one of the "bed-rocks": not so, however, this world, which we know only empirically and as a particular phase of our other "bed-rock" (viz. consciousness). Accordingly, the test of any metaphysic is not that it should square with the world as we know it, but that it should square with the ultimate value.
The Many are understandable only as manifestations of the One: the One, only as incarnate in the Many.
Ultimate reality rests in a Masculine-Feminine dualism, in which the old trinity of Truth, Beauty, Goodness, is extended to embrace the whole of Being and Becoming; Truth consisting in this--That Infinite and Omnipotent Love creates, preserves, and delights in, Infinite and Perfect Beauty . . . . Love and Beauty are, in this duality, coequal and coeternal; and, by a violent antimony, Love, owing his mere being to this strengthless perfection which he holds at his mercy, adores and is enslaved by her, while Beauty (by a like antinomy) queens it over the very omnipotence which both created her and is her only safeguard.
litrix.com |
