Last night we looked at William Blake - some of the symbolism and the Neoplatonic themes in his work.
We also touched on John Scotus Eriugena (c.800 - c. 877 A.D.), philosopher and theologian, and his startlingly profound writing on the correspondence between the seen and the unseen worlds:
For everything that is understood and sensed is nothing else but -
the utterance of the unutterable
the access to the inaccessible
the understanding of the unintelligible
the body of the bodiless
the essence of the superessential
the form of the formless
the measure of the measureless
the number of the unnumbered
the weight of the weightless
the materialization of the spiritual
the visibility of the invisible
the place of that which is in no place
the time of the timeless
the definition of the infinite
the circumscription of the uncircumscribed
- The act of creation is the self-manifestation of the hidden transcendent God
From a particular perspective then, our quest is to see anagogically through the form to the formless, and then in reverse the invisible becomes visible and the unmanifest manifest.
ReplyDelete"Our loftiest feelings are not the ones that happen by themselves, but the ones achieved through strenouous and energetic thinking." ( Rudolf Steiner referring to thoughts that lead to higher levels of existence)
That's how I'd see it: visible to the eye of Intellect, which doesn't quite sit with words like "strenuous" and "energetic", but we understand what is meant.
ReplyDeleteBlake: "To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the worlds of Thought, into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination."
John Sparrow (b.1615-1665?): "This outward world is the best outward looking-glasse to see whatever hath been, is, or shall be in Eternity, and our own minds are the best inward looking-glasse to see Eternity exactly in."