Reading Plato's Republic, it is indeed an unanswered paradox that it is proposed that poets be excluded. What of the Republic of Letters? It certainly is the case that the Aristophanes play The Clouds did a "number" on Socrates. Likewise, Voltaire's' Candide pilloried Leibniz. The forms of art, poetry, drama, sculpture, architecture and music purport to have a sort of solid inviolability supported by reason. Or at least that was the case until those very forms became a source for irrational arbitrary "invention." Indeed, there is a sort of self consistency with those very forms as a "language" that provide the opportunity for the development of the truthful irony of the finite work of art versus the non finite possibility of development. Therein, perhaps, lies supernal beauty.
Upon what ground exactly is the rationale of the critic's work founded? I have recently written for example that there is a "test" for religion. If it is unfettered and unchecked does what passes for religion devolve into a mere tool to stir the passions in obeisance to the whims of a ruling oligarchy? In America, Edgar Poe apparently gained undying enmity beyond the grave for his trenchant criticism of the ills of poetic meter. However, there is perhaps much more to that sort of criticism than meets the eye, since it is the case that his satires were always political. Even Poe's comment that the extremely popular tales of his contemporary James Cooper were in truth rather pedestrian and that Cooper was a "quietist." This, even though Cooper was quite comfortable in exposing and justifiably denouncing the oligarchy of Venice and the contemporaneous press of his day as being a tool of would be American oligarchs.
Today, this charge of quietism has almost no touchstone for modern audiences. However, that was far from the case at the time. For instance, take the poem of Henry Longfellow, The Three Silences of Molinos. This is a kind of paean to another New England radical, abolitionist "mystic," John Whittier. Now this Molinos was indeed, a quietest. In order to trace out all of the seemingly chaotic connections that were quite well known at that time and bring them to "light" in terms of today's touchstones for my readers it is necessary to take a detour down a somewhat arcane sort of rabbit hole. But I promise it is quite relevant to the current political and social circumstances in which we find ourselves embroiled.
Whittier wrote a sort of a paean to Master Eckhart, wherein much is made of rather mystically magical practices like the lots of Urim and Thummin that resolve into this mystical quietism:
The heaven ye seek, the hell ye fear,
Are with yourselves alone.
Now, it does appear that Nicolas of Cusa did indeed perform a study of Eckhart and by some modern critics is lumped into the category of "brethren of free spirits" such as those movements stemming from the mysticism of the Beguins, Beghards and Marguerite Porete's "Mirror of Divine Love." However, as I will show nothing could be further from the truth, as Cusa was quite the opposite of the Cathars, Bogomils, and a vast plethora of other Gnostics. If the term "free spirit" reminds the baby boomer reader of the epoch of Haight Ashbury and the "summer of love," it is no accident.
The diggers (and their devilish offspring, the ranters) were a back to the land anarchist movement at the time of the various dissenters of the English civil wars. Free love, hippie communes were explicitly modelled upon these diggers. (Can you dig it?) Indeed, William James' Varieties of Religious Experience is a sort of key for the British oligarchy to utilize to create syncretic movements as part and parcel of divide and conquer, popular people's movements. In fact, the back to the land self reliance movement of the dead poets society (perhaps as in the "Book of the Dead" or Gogol's "Dead Souls") of the New England transcendentalists was inspired by the bizarre quietus novel, Sartor Resartus of Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle was the writer that Poe referred to as a bedlamist, who attempted to pervert Schiller's conception of uplifting aesthetics of the reliving of the dramatic historical crises, much as Shakespeare did likewise. And the same Carlyle who later wrote a vile tract justifying plantation slavery called "On the Negro Question."
It is sometimes claimed by the mystical cult of the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood and T.S. Eliot, that Dante Alighieri and Marguerite Porete were in some ways birds of a feather. And as such are representatives of an earlier pre Renaissance era of simplicity and courtly Romanticism. This parallels the slander against Cusa's mysticism.. For it could be said that Marguerite wrote in the vernacular old French in order to uplift the common people with a national language, etc. However, nothing could be further from the truth and in no way compares to Dante's grand political design in his De Monarchia and Divine Commedia. Likewise Cusa's convening of a great council for reconciliation of faiths to bring about an end to barbaric geopolitical wars of his day. These were both real world challenges that laid the groundwork for the yet to be developed scientific statesmanship of the American System.
I turn now to the theme I briefly brought up in my last posting on Cusa: concrete universals. In his Vision of God, Cusa furthers his claim to a scientific method that is wholly consonant with the idea of the principle of the ongoing process of perfecting human practice. Sometimes referred to as the Imago Viva Dei. I have brought up elsewhere that the Meno dialogue of Plato is analogous to an untutored child grasping profound principles of science that represent clear revolutionary historical advances. For example, the practice of the infinite "vanishing point" in drawing is elementary and easily reproduced by any grade school student. However, look at this in light of Cusa's Concrete Universal. Really the principle that no matter where you look, that infinite projective space, a concrete universal, is ever present would seem miraculous to previous untutored societies. This is the non mystical meaning of the connection of the universal mind, the maximum, non other with the sovereign and inviolable non divisible mind (or soul if you will) of the individual.
And so, here, I need to make another downward journey into the bestiality of what motivates the control of the oligarchy and its hatred of the principle of Prometheus, the bringer of the technology of fire. Various mystery cults that promote the control of priesthoods owned by oligarchies have been with us since time immemorial before it were even possible for epic poems to be written down. The most perverted and egregious of these would have to reside here in the Americas with the death cult rituals of the Aztecs. However, it must be kept in mind that the heinous and superstitious magic of child sacrifice serves as the basis of most of these oligarchical epics including the Greek cycle of tragedies of the House of Atreus.
So the question is how does it make any sense that these same monstrous Aztecs who carried out such thoroughly evil rituals also had intricate knowledge of astronomical cyclic calendars? Well, the answer is it was that very actual power that necessitated esotericism. I leave this for you dear reader to follow up on, for it is my hope that that this might engender a thirst to resolve the many paradoxes that the forgoing brings to mind.
