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Many are the ways of theophany, "at sundry times, and in divers manners," to one the burning bush, to another the Urim and Thummin, to another the dew on the fleece, to one this, to another that. To our man of the Spirit, as to the sage of Patmos, human history, because moved from above, was the visible presence of God.
We must ask for a single instance of a family or tribe, in a complex of semi-barbaric but not savage tribes of one speech, owning a private deity who happened to be the Maker and Ruler of the world, and, as such, was accepted by all the tribes. Jehovah came out from Sinai, because, there having been a Theophany at Sinai, that mountain was regarded as one of his seats.
He reaches no true mediation, no true union of God and man, for he makes the incarnation a mere theophany, the flesh a useless burden, to be one day laid aside. The Lord is our Redeemer and the conqueror of death and Satan, but there is no room for a second Adam, the organic head of regenerate mankind.
Another difficulty arises. The Bāb does not always say the same thing. There are passages of the Persian Bayan which imply an interval between his own theophany and the next parallel to that which separated his own theophany from Muḥammad's. He says, for instance, in Waḥid II. Bāb 17, according to Professor Browne, I quote next from Waḥid III. Bāb 15:
From this it follows that our pleasure in the naive, being connected with an idea of the reason, is not purely aesthetic, but partly moral. The naivete of children appeals to us because they are what we were and what we should again become. They represent an ideal, a theophany. Though we may look down upon the childish, we can only look up to the childlike. Genius is always naive.
O ye bountiful immortals, will ye give me prophetic knowledge that I may lead men aside from the error of their ways; what punishment shall be his who strives to set up in our midst a king belonging to the Daeva party? The Theophany of Ahura-Mazda to Zarathustra. I saw Ahura-Mazda on high and he made known to me his truth, that I may tell it to men.
You have, in this contemplative outlook, carried the peculiar methods of artistic apprehension to their highest stage: with the result that the sense-world has become for you, as Erigena said that all creatures were, "a theophany, or appearance of God." Not, you observe, a symbol, but a showing: a very different thing.
In him, indeed, immutably and essentially, all things are; he is in himself division and collection, the genus and the species, the whole and the part of the created universe." "What is a pure idea? It is, in proper terms, a theophany: that is to say, a manifestator of God in the human soul."
He himself is the center of his whole scientific and religious system, and the categories into which he divides all things are determined by his own sense of self-interest. +228+. It is often by accident that one object or another displays itself as helpful or harmful, just as, in a later and higher form of religious belief, a theophany is often, as to time and place, a matter of accident.
When you turn your eyes on the diaphanous veil of the Mighty Mother, and see it sparkling and gleaming like that, it is but a step to seeing the motions of the Great Life behind; but a step to seeing 'Eternal Beauty wander on her way; that Beauty which is the grand Theophany or manifestation of God.
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