Searching for God # 68

 It seems much easier to discern the culprits in this maddening, frenetic and obsessive-compulsive drive to billions and trillions by those who have already creamed off their first several millions, than it does to find the 21^st century echoes of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron.

In an  essay entitled, “Romantic Poetry and the Culture of Modernity, by James Engells, 2001, from the Harvard Library, whose URL is:

http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.lustRepos:2689348

we read:

Now we are on the verge of altering our own natures genetically. If we do it well, it will be worthwhile, but the flow of knowledge and its implications for what we mean by human nature continue to accelerate. Romantic poets answer the challenge of humanizing the knowledge we gain, of remaining human in the face of the new powers and new sorrows such knowledge brings. Their obstinate questionings, their poems, are therefore friends to us, but the challenge persists. We hope for great spirits now on earth. Los admonishes us. We stand, like Keats's dreamer--or poet-- in The Fall of Hyperion, at the bottom of the steps, and we are admonished.

“Romantic poets answer the challenge of humanizing the knowledge we gain, or remaining human in the face of the new power and new sorrows such knowledge brings. We hope for great spirits now on earth”…..

What inspiration can the ‘great spirits now on earth draw from the Romantics? And what impact can such inspiration have on the theology of the last three quarters of the 21^st century and beyond?

We find hints of answers from Karen Armstrong in The Case for God p. 231:

Wordsworth’s younger contemporary John Keats (1795-1821) used the term ‘Negative , Capability’ to describe the ekstatic attitude that was essential to poetic insight. It occurred ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Instead of seeking to control the world by aggressive reasoning, Keats was ready to plunge into the dark night of unknowing: ‘I am however young writing at random- straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness—without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion. He claimed gleefully that he had no opinions at all, because he had no self. A poet, he believed, was ‘the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity. True poetry had no time for ‘the egotistical sublime,’ which forced itself on the reader:

We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hands in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject,--How beautiful are the retired flowers! How they would lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out ‘admire me I am a violet! Dote on me I am a primrose. (Keats to J, H, Reynolds, February 3, 1818)

Where the philosophers had been wary of the imagination, Keats saw it as a sacred faculty that brought new truth into the world. ‘I am certain of nothing but of the loneliness of the heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the Imagination sees as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their Sublime creative of essential beauty.’ (Keats to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817)

Keats, the poet was more than ‘ready’ to enter into the dark night of unknowing. His notion of ‘Negative Capability’ describes the ekstatic attitude of poetic insight when one is capable of being in, with and even under uncertainties.

Through a history of scientific/military advancements, and through two world wars while science seemed destined to demonstrate its dominance over human thought, there were glimpses of a different point of view.

For example, ‘(i)n or about December 1910, human nature changed,’ wrote the British novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) after visiting the startling exhibition of French impressionist painters. Artists deliberately flouted their viewers’ expectations, tacitly proclaiming the need for a new vision in a new world. Old certainties were evaporating….People wanted to break the pat asunder split the tom to make something new Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) either dismembered his subjects of viewed them simultaneously from different perspectives. The novels of Woolf and James Joyce (1882-1941) abandoned the traditional narratives of cause and effect, throwing their readers into the chaotic stream of their characters’ consciousness, so that they were uncertain about what was actually happening or how they should judge the action. (Karen Armstrong, op. cit. p 262)

Later, “in his seminal book, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934),
the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, upheld the rationality of science and its commitment to rigorous testing and principled neutrality, but argued that it did not, as commonly thought, proceed by the systematic and cumulative collection of empirically verified facts. It moved forward when scientists came up with bold, imaginative guesses that could never be perfectly verified and were no more reliable than any other ‘belief’, because testing could show only that a hypothesis was not false. Popper was often heard to say: ‘We don’t know anything.’ (Highlighting mine) According to British philosopher Bryan Magee, he believed that this was the ‘most important philosophical insight there is, which ought to inform all our philosophical activity’. (Ibid, p. 267)

The central thread of the imagination, for poets, for scientists and I would once again suggest, for James Hillman, at the core of his archetypal psychology, brings us to a nexus where two phrases intersect: ‘soul saving’ and ‘soul making’.

Britannica.com says this about soul:

The immaterial aspect or essence of a human being, that which confers individuality and humanity, often considered to be synonymous with the mind or the self. In theology, the soul is further defined as that part of the individual which partakes of divinity and often is considered to survive the death of the body…Among ancient peoples, both the Egyptians and the Chinese conceived of a dual soul. The Egyptian ka (breath) survived death but remained near the body, while the spiritual ba proceeded to the region of the dead. The Chinese distinguished between a lower, sensitive soul, which disappears with death, and a rational principle, the hun, which survives the grave and is the object of ancestor worship….To Rene Descartes, man was a union of the body and soul, each a distinct substance acting on the other; the soul was equivalent to the mind. To Benedict de Spinoza, body and soul formed two aspects of a single reality. Immanuel Kant concluded that the soul was not demonstrable through reason, although the mind inevitably must reach the conclusion that the soul exists because such a conclusion was necessary for the development of ethics and religion. To William James at the beginning of the 20^th century, the soul as such did not exist at all but was merely a collection of psychic phenomena….In Hinduism, the atman (breath or soul) is the universal, eternal self, of which each individual soul (jiva or jiva-atman) partakes….Buddhism negates the concept not only of the individual self but of the atman as well, asserting that any sense of having an individual eternal sol or of partaking in a persistent universal self is illusory.

The London Magazine (thelondonmagazine.org) in a piece focusing on two letters from John Keats, to J.H. Reynolds, 22 November 1817, and to J.A. Hessey, 8^th October 1818, reports:

In  long letter, written in early 1819, Keats recorded his commitment to individuation with characteristic eloquence:

The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is a ‘vale of tears’ from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven—What a little circumscribed straightened notion! Cal the world if you please ‘The Vale of Soul-making.’ Then you will find out the use of the world…Do you not see how necessary a world of Pain and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

London Magazine interjects: Tellingly, Kets characterized his insight as a faint sketch of a system of salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity. The Christian vale of tears becomes the Romantic vale of self-creation. In the story of the self it is a paradigmatic moment of linguistic and philosophical sublation.*

(*Sublation: translates the German ‘aufhebung, to cancel, to keep, and ‘to lift up, the philosophical concept meaning to cancel or negate something while simultaneously preserving of lifting it up to a higher level.)

In addition to borrowing Keat’s “vale of tears for soul making,” Hillman pay homage to the Italian philosopher, Ficino:

….(F)or Ficino the soul was ‘all things together’…the center of the universe, the middle term in all things. Psyche, not man, was the center and measure. ‘The fascination of Ficino’s work lies precisely here: in the invitation to look beyond the opaque surfaces of reality… in seeing not the body but the soul…as only the one who sees this soul sees man, as all things have their truth and this is their soul, whether they be plants or stones or stars in heaven.’ Ficinian philosophizing is in essence only an invitation to see with the eyes of the soul, the soul of things, an incentive to plumb the depths of one’s own soul so that the whole world may become clearer in he inner light. (James Hillman, Revisioning Psychology,  p. 201)

Hillman continues:

Events are related (in this modality)first and foremost to soul rather than to theology of God, science of nature, or humanistic disciplines of language, poetics and history. The question asks what bearing this even has jupon soul sees through and interiorizes, and so Ficino’s thought has been called a ‘philosophy of immanence.’ It is also a psychologizing The immanence of soul in all things and areas of study dissolves the borders between faculties and deliteralizes their contents When we turn to the psychology in a philosophy, theology or science, we no longer study the field literally fir this psychological activity educates away from the literal content and the literal notion of separate fields and departments…Ficino’s ‘triumph of decompartmentalization’ (from various subject-matter perspectives, and back to the basic events)was opposed by every vested interest in science, traditional academic philosophy and theology. Neoplatonism dangerously relativized the absolute superiority of Christian revelation, which became of Neoplatonic psychology became one perspective among many. (Ibid, p.201-202)

If, in this modality, ‘soul’ studies ‘soul’ then an attempt is implicit that not academic, clinical, or scientific ‘classifications are the starting point for any interpretation of events. The event, the story, is the first and primary evidence. And, when considered from this perspective, academic disciplines are neither discarded, nor abrogated, only set aside until after a ‘new and different’ perspective has been deployed…that of the imagination….and from the imagination, that of which achetype, metaphor, pattern is playing out in this ‘in extremis’ moment.

And example, sadly repeated, might be the insurrectional removal of a clergy, as a metaphoric reenactment of the Crucifixion.

To be continued…….