Endeavour is all
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A caricature of Angelus Silesius in a protestant publication of 1664. The protestants denounced and attacked Silesius, a Catholic mystic, for all types of heresy and depicted him as a peddler of potions, gambling cards, and other immoral behaviours.
Endeavour is all
Spiritual endeavour must only exist to turn us towards a higher reality.
Once the endeavour becomes an accepted body of knowledge it eliminates the higher reality that is sought, i.e it eliminates the Logos.
Consider the words of Silesius:
I know that without me no God can live; were I brought to naught, he would of necessity have to give up the ghost.
These words seem to support the view that the endeavour is all, i.e. it is within the human endeavour that God, i.e. the Logos lives. It might be said that the endeavour is the Logos. More than this, the words of Silesius stress the individuality of the endeavour, i.e. that the Logos is something that I create.
The active nature of the endeavour deals with the question of chronology posed earlier (in Thought blog Truth: inside out):
I am called upon at this point to pause and consider a question related to the proposition that ‘the Logos is something we create’.
In the above proposition, is not the ‘I’ prior to the Logos? Does this not make the presupposed ‘I’ an abstraction, and can anything precede the Logos anyway?
We are in a damned if we are, or damned if we’re not scenario, because if the ‘I’ does not precede the Logos, the Logos exists without the ‘I’.
In either case the ‘I’ as active creator is lost.
In response to the proposition that the 'I' is lost, we can say that Truth, i.e. the Logos, is not something fully rounded and finished forever, Truth is an active endeavour or, to put it another way, the Logos, or God, is actively created. This surely helps us to appreciate the words of Silesius, because, by implication, when the activity stops,‘were I brought to naught’, then God ‘would of necessity have to give up the ghost’. Rather than lost, the 'I' in this explication becomes critical to the existence of the Logos. Here God and the 'I' live together or die together.
© John Dunn.
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William Blake’s Urizen, the demiurge, a distant Jehovah, the 'self-deluded and anxious' shaper of pre-existent matter.
The transgressor is Saviour
The point that Silesius was making, i.e. that the Logos is the active endeavour of the ‘I’ (see ‘Thought blog Endeavour is all) applies also to society.
In order for a society to live it must have spirit. When this is lacking, society becomes only so much dead matter.
As the phenomenon of an active endeavour, society cannot have its roots inthe world that exists, but in that which is to come, or, to be more accurate, that which is in a state of becoming. The roots of a society which is to come are purely inner, they are in the idea, they are in living thought, they are in the spirit.
In a spiritual society, the idea justifies the form that is to come, otherwise the form is already an alteration of the spiritual.
To pay obeisance to a society without spirit is analogous to worshipping William Blake’s Urizen, the demiurge, a distant Jehovah, the 'self-deluded and anxious' shaper of pre-existent matter.
Like doctrinal religion, profane societies need laws, rules, contracts and institutions: they are those laws which, growing old as man progresses, constitute the force of the Pharisees of every age and the reason for the ideal struggle of the few who in each age attempt to renew them, whilst complying with them.
The error of believing that the existing society is true must not be committed, as only that which is created and still has to be created can be true.
The transgressor is Saviour.
© John Dunn.
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Imagination divine
In our two previous ‘Thought blogs’, Endeavour is all and The transgressor is Saviour, we considered Truth, i.e. the Logos, as not something fully rounded and finished forever, Truth is rather an active endeavour or, to put it another way, the Logos, or God, is actively created.
Next we considered society in the same vein, concluding that the error of believing that the existing society is true must not be committed, as only that which is created and still has to be created can be true.
Now we turn to the individual.
There is a tendency for the individual to confront the object as something wholly apart, given and ready-made. Thus his relationship with the object becomes conformity, dependence, and mystical submissiveness to reality. Faith rises, but in the lowest form - as faith in the physical fact.
The role of the onlooker’s active creative intuition, i.e. living thought, in the full and complete development of the object as itappears to us is lost. The ready-made world we behold around us is the product of dead thought, or rather reflected thought, because, our role being lost, what we see is our own creative input reflected back to us as reality, i.e. reflected back to us as something ready-made and inevitable.
Our potential for freedom lies in our successful reinstatement of the active, creative and intuitive “I” back into the process of thinking, and so back into the otherwise dead world around us.
Like the Logos and society, the world around us should be seen as the product of active, creative thought.
This, to some small extent, echoes William Blake’s belief that ‘Jesus is the imagination’, not meaning that Jesus is imaginary in the fanciful sense,but rather that imagination itself is the divine creator.
© John Dunn.
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