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So let Isocrates, the 'old man eloquent, let a many-worded not unpeculant patriotic Demosthenes who knew nothing of the God-world attend to an Athens wherein the Gods were no longer greatly interested; the great Star Plato should rise up into mid-heaven, and shine not in, but high over Athens and quite apart from her; drawing from her indeed the external elements of his culture, but the light and substance from that which was potent in her no longer.
Because it is based on a knowledge of the God-world; because her eyes were focused for the things 'on the other side of the sky'; because this world, for her, was a mere reflexion and thin concealment of the other, and the mists between her and the Divine 'defecate' constantly, in Coleridge's curious phrase, 'to a clear transparency. Things seen were an open window into the Infinite; but with us, heaven knows, that window is so thick filthy with selfhood, so cobwebbed and begrimed with passion and egotism and individualism and all the smoke and soot of the brain-mind, that given an artist with a natural tendency to see through, he has to waste half his life first in cleaning it with picks and mattocks and charges of dynamite.
Hithertoo Greek carvers had been making images of the Gods, symbolic indeed with wings, thunderbolts and other appurtenances; but trivially symbolic; mere imitation of the symbolism, without the dignity or religious feeling, of the Egyptians and Babylonians; as if their gods and worship had been mere conventions, about which they had felt nothing deep; now, upon this urge from the God-world, a sense of the grandeur of the within comes on them; they seek a means of expressing it: throw off the old conventions; will carve the Gods as men; do so, their aspiration leading them on to perfect mastery: for a moment achieve Egyptian sublimity; but have personalized the Gods; and dear knows what that may lead to presently.
Aristides, with convincing logic, had been able to persuade all Greece to act against a common danger under an Athens then morally great, and feeling this new force from the God-world as a wine in the air, a mental ozone, an inspiration from the subliminal to heroic endeavor.
I will send one among them, with the "Gloves for his treasure," said he. They considered how it would be with Such a One: going among men as the Gods' Messenger, and with those two Gloves for his treasure. "This way will it be," they said. "Not having the treasure of the God of Light, he will seem as one without vision of the God-world or remembrance whence he came.
It is not excellent gentlemen that can do such near-thaumaturgic business; but only disciples; for the proposition is, as I understand it, to link this world with the God-world, and hold fast through thunders and cataclysm, so that what shall come through, what shall be when the thunder is stilled and the cataclysm over, shall flow on and up onto a new order of cycles, higher, nearer the Spirit. . . . . No; it is not to be done by amiable gentlemen, or excellent administrators, or clever politicians. . . . Julian had come flaming down into the world, to see if he could rouse up and call together those who should do it; but his bugles had sounded in the empty desert, and died away over the sands.
So you go in search once more for a political method of dealing with that one and only oppressing thing, the detritus, your karma; and away you go squirreling round the changes again; and all this you call political evolution, as I dare say the squirrel does his own gyrations in his cage; whereas if you found Tao, if you lived balancedly, if you kept open the channels between this and the God-world, there would be no political evolution at all no squirreling, but only calm, untrammeled beautiful life.
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