Part 80 (1/2)
Civilizations have risen and perished, either by the anarchical insanity of Despotism, or by the despotic anarchy of Revolt.
To organize Anarchy, is the problem which the revolutionists have and will eternally have to resolve. It is the rock of Sisyphus that will always fall back upon them. To exist a single instant, they are and always will be by fatality reduced to improvise a despotism without other reason of existence than necessity, and which, consequently, is violent and blind as Necessity. We escape from the harmonious monarchy of Reason, only to fall under the irregular dictators.h.i.+p of Folly.
Sometimes superst.i.tious enthusiasms, sometimes the miserable calculations of the materialist instinct have led astray the nations, and G.o.d at last urges the world on toward believing Reason and reasonable Beliefs.
We have had prophets enough without philosophy, and philosophers without religion; the blind believers and the skeptics resemble each other, and are as far the one as the other from the eternal salvation.
In the chaos of universal doubt and of the conflicts of Reason and Faith, the great men and Seers have been but infirm and morbid artists, seeking the beau-ideal at the risk and peril of their reason and life.
Living only in the hope to be crowned, they are the first to do what Pythagoras in so touching a manner prohibits in his admirable Symbols; they rend crowns, and tread them under foot.
Light is the equilibrium of Shadow and Lucidity.
Movement is the equilibrium of Inertia and Activity.
Authority is the equilibrium of Liberty and Power.
Wisdom is equilibrium in the Thoughts, which are the scintillations and rays of the Intellect.
Virtue is equilibrium in the Affections: Beauty is harmonious proportion in Forms.
The beautiful lives are the accurate ones, and the magnificences of Nature are an algebra of graces and splendors.
Everything just is beautiful; everything beautiful ought to be just.
There is, in fact, no Nothing, no void Emptiness, in the Universe. From the upper or outer surface of our atmosphere to that of the Sun, and to those of the Planets and remote Stars, in different directions, Science has for hundreds of centuries imagined that there was simple, void, empty s.p.a.ce. Comparing finite knowledge with the Infinite, the Philosophers know little more than the apes! In all that ”void” s.p.a.ce are the Infinite Forces of G.o.d, acting in an infinite variety of directions, back and forth, and never for an instant inactive. In all of it, active through the whole of its Infinity, is the Light that is the Visible Manifestation of G.o.d. The earth and every other planet and sphere that is not a Centre of Light, carries its cone of shadow with it as it flies and flashes round in its...o...b..t; but the darkness has no _home_ in the Universe. To illuminate the sphere on one side, is to project a cone of darkness on the other; and Error also is the Shadow of the Truth with which G.o.d illuminates the Soul.
In all that ”Void,” also, is the Mysterious and ever Active Electricity, and Heat, and the Omnipresent Ether. At the will of G.o.d the Invisible becomes Visible. Two invisible gases, combined by the action of a Force of G.o.d, and compressed, become and remain the water that fills the great basins of the seas, flows in the rivers and rivulets, leaps forth from the rocks or springs, drops upon the earth in rains, or whitens it with snows, and bridges the Danubes with ice, or gathers in vast reservoirs in the earth's bosom. G.o.d manifested fills all the extension that we foolishly call Empty s.p.a.ce and the Void.
And everywhere in the Universe, what we call Life and Movement results from a continual conflict of Forces or Impulses. Whenever that active antagonism ceases, the immobility and inertia, which are Death, result.
If, says the Kabalah, the Justice of G.o.d, which is Severity or the Female, alone reigned, creation of imperfect beings such as man would from the beginning have been impossible, because Sin being congenital with Humanity, the Infinite Justice, measuring the Sin by the Infinity of the G.o.d offended against, must have annihilated Humanity at the instant of its creation; and not only Humanity but the Angels, since these also, like all created by G.o.d and less than perfect, are sinful.
Nothing imperfect would have been possible. If, on the other hand, the Mercy or Benignity of G.o.d, the Male, were in no wise counteracted, Sin would go unpunished, and the Universe fall into a chaos of corruption.
Let G.o.d but repeal a single principle or law of chemical attraction or sympathy, and the antagonistic forces equilibrated in matter, released from constraint, would instantaneously expand all that we term matter into impalpable and invisible gases, such as water or steam is, when, confined in a cylinder and subjected to an immense degree of that mysterious force of the Deity which we call ”heat,” it is by its expansion released.
Incessantly the great currents and rivers of air flow and rush and roll from the equator to the frozen polar regions, and back from these to the torrid equatorial realms. Necessarily incident to these great, immense, equilibrated and beneficent movements, caused by the antagonism of equatorial heat and polar cold, are the typhoons, tornadoes, and cyclones that result from conflicts between the rus.h.i.+ng currents. These and the benign trade-winds result from the same great law. G.o.d is omnipotent; but effects without causes are impossible, and these effects cannot but sometimes be evil. The fire would not warm, if it could not also burn, the human flesh. The most virulent poisons are the most sovereign remedies, when given in due proportion. The Evil is the shadow of the Good, and inseparable from it.
The Divine Wisdom limits by equipoise the Omnipotence of the Divine Will or Power, and the result is Beauty or Harmony. The arch rests not on a single column, but springs from one on either side. So is it also with the Divine Justice and Mercy, and with the Human Reason and Human Faith.
That purely scholastic Theology, issue of the Categories of Aristotle and of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, that logic of the syllogism which argues instead of reasoning, and finds a response to every thing by subtilizing on terms, wholly ignored the Kabalastic dogma and wandered off into the drear vacuity of darkness. It was less a philosophy or a wisdom than a philosophical automaton, replying by means of springs, and uncoiling its theses like a wheeled movement. It was not the human verb but the monotonous cry of a machine, the inanimate speech of an Androd.
It was the fatal precision of mechanism, instead of a free application of rational necessities. ST. THOMAS AQUINAS crushed with a single blow all this scaffolding of words built one upon the other, by proclaiming the eternal Empire of Reason, in that magnificent sentence, ”_A thing is not just because_ G.o.d _wills it; but_ G.o.d _wills it because it is just_.” The proximate consequence of this proposition, arguing from the greater to the less, was this: ”_A thing is not true because_ ARISTOTLE _has said it; but_ ARISTOTLE _could not reasonably say it unless it was true. Seek then, first of all, the_ TRUTH _and_ JUSTICE, _and the Science of_ ARISTOTLE _will be given you in addition_.”
It is the fine dream of the greatest of the Poets, that h.e.l.l, become useless, is to be closed at length, by the aggrandizement of Heaven; that the problem of Evil is to receive its final solution, and Good alone, necessary and triumphant, is to reign in Eternity. So the Persian dogma taught that AHRIMAN and his subordinate ministers of Evil were at last, by means of a Redeemer and Mediator, to be reconciled with Deity, and all Evil to end. But unfortunately, the philosopher forgets all the laws of equilibrium, and seeks to absorb the Light in a splendor without shadow, and movement in an absolute repose that would be the cessation of life. So long as there shall be a visible light, there will be a shadow proportional to this Light, and whatever is illuminated will cast its cone of shadow. Repose will never be happiness, if it is not balanced by an a.n.a.logous and contrary movement. This is the immutable law of Nature, the Eternal Will of the JUSTICE which is G.o.d.
The same reason necessitates Evil and Sorrow in Humanity, which renders indispensable the bitterness of the waters of the seas. Here also, Harmony can result only from the a.n.a.logy of contraries, and what is above exists by reason of what is below. It is the depth that determines the height; and if the valleys are filled up, the mountains disappear: so, if the shadows are effaced, the Light is annulled, which is only visible by the graduated contrast of gloom and splendor, and universal obscurity will be produced by an immense dazzling. Even the colors in the Light only exist by the presence of the shadow: it is the threefold alliance of the day and night, the luminous image of the dogma, the Light made Shadow, as the Saviour is the Logos made man: and all this reposes on the same law, the primary law of creation, the single and absolute law of Nature, that of the distinction and harmonious ponderation of the contrary forces in the universal equipoise.
The two great columns of the Temple that symbolizes the Universe are Necessity, or the omnipotent Will of G.o.d, which nothing can disobey, and Liberty, or the free-will of His creatures. Apparently and to our human reason antagonistic, the same Reason is not incapable of comprehending how they can be in equipoise. The Infinite Power and Wisdom could so plan the Universe and the Infinite Succession of things as to leave man free to act, and, foreseeing what each would at every instant think and do, to make of the free-will and free-action of each an instrument to aid in effecting its general purpose. For even a man, foreseeing that another will do a certain act, and in nowise controlling or even influencing him may use that action as an instrument to effect his own purposes.
The Infinite Wisdom of G.o.d foresees what each will do, and uses it as an instrument, by the exertion of His Infinite Power, which yet does not control the Human action so as to annihilate its freedom. The result is Harmony, the third column that upholds the Lodge. The same Harmony results from the equipoise of Necessity and Liberty. The will of G.o.d is not for an instant defeated nor thwarted, and this is the Divine Victory; and yet He does not tempt nor constrain men to do Evil, and thus His Infinite Glory is unimpaired. The result is Stability, Cohesion, and Permanence in the Universe, and undivided Dominion and Autocracy in the Deity. And these, Victory, Glory, Stability, and Dominion, are the last four Sephiroth of the Kabalah.