Thoughts, Wordsworth, Berdyaev, Bloy -

Enter into the life world before the War to End All Wars gave us an American Century

A meditation rose on me that night
Upon the lonely mountain when the scene
Had passed away, and it appeared to me
The perfect image of a mighty mind,
Of one that feeds upon infinity,
That is exalted by an under-presence,
The sense of God, or whatso’er is dim
Or vast in its own being … (1805 Prelude, lines 66-73)

The final book of the Prelude (1805) opens with a description of a night-time ascent of Snowdon, a mountain in North Wales that Wordsworth climbed in 1791 when he was 21. Following an arduous journey to the summit the poet sees a flash of light which reveals ‘a huge sea of mist […] as far as sight’ can reach (line 51). From ‘a fracture in the vapour’ he hears ‘the roar of waters, torrents, streams / Innumerable, roaring with one voice’ (lines 59-60).

Later that night, Wordsworth reflects on his experience. The means by which ‘Nature’ transforms the mist into an ‘ocean’ (line 44), a vision of grandeur effacing the majesty of the ‘real sea’ (line 47), resembles the creative power of the imagination: that ‘glorious faculty / Which higher minds bear with them as their own’ (lines 89-90). Mind and nature, that is, are united in their ability to ‘mould’, ‘abstract’ and ‘combine’ the ‘outward face of things’ into images ‘awful and sublime’ (74-9;)

As Léon Bloy has well said in Le Pélerin de l’Absolu, “Souffrir passe, avoir souffert ne passe jamais” (“Suffering disappears, but the fact of having suffered always remains with us.”). This is a remarkable aphorism demanding the broadest possible interpretation. Victory may indeed be achieved over what has been experienced, and yet that experience is still in our possession as a permanent enhancement and extension of the reality of our spiritual life. What has once been lived through cannot possibly be effaced. That which has been continues to exist in a transfigured form. Man is by no means a completely finished product. Rather he moulds and creates himself in and through his experience of life, through spiritual conflict, and through those various trials which his destiny imposes upon him. Man is only what God is planning, a projected design. (Nicolas Berdyaev, Freedom and the Spirit, 3rd ed., trans. Oliver Fielding Clarke, 1944, p. vii)

Of course the avaricious man of our day, be he landlord, merchant, industrialist, does not adore sacks of coins or bundles of banknotes in some little chapel and upon some little altar. He does not kneel before these spoils of other men, nor does he address prayers or canticles to them amidst odorous clouds of incense. But he proclaims that money is the only good, and he yields it all his soul. A cult sincere, without hypocrisy, never growing weary, never forsworn. Whenever he says, in the debasement of his heart and his speech, that he loves money for the delights it can purchase, he lies or he terribly deceives himself, this very assertion being belied at the very moment he utters it by every one of his acts, by the infinite toil and pains to which he gladly condemns himself in order to acquire or conserve that money which is but the visible figure of the Blood of Christ circulating throughout all His members.

The Wisdom of the Bourgeois," p. 98

The Bourgeois who has religious feelings sees very clearly the absolute necessity of serving two masters at the same time in order to achieve success in his business, which naturally comes before everything else.

p. 113

I see from time to time coins that are tinted with red, having been handled by a butcher or a murderer, and the sight of that money makes me wonder. As I think about the probable origin of that sign of wealth, I tell myself that that is indeed its true color, the color which it should, which it must have, the color that was doubtless taken on by Judas’s pieces of silver, after which he ceased to recognize them and returned them at once to the egregious scoundrels who had given them to him. These, not recognizing the pieces themselves, did not want to return to the treasury of the Temple money so strange in its color. Everyone knows they used it to buy the field of blood, a generic name which I imagine can be applied to all bourgeois holdings ever since the Scourging and Crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

p. 120

At bottom, what should you do to avoid being an idiot or a swine? Merely this: you should do something great, you should lay aside all the foolishness of a more of less long existence, you should become resigned to the fact that you will seem ridiculous to a race of janitors and bureaucrats if you are to enter the service of Splendor. Then you will know what it means to be the friend of God. The Friend of God! I am on the verge of tears when I think of it. No longer do you know on what block to lay your head, no longer do you know where you are, where you should go. You would like to tear out your heart, so hotly does it burn, and you cannot look upon a creature without trembling with love. You would like to drag yourself on your knees from church to church, with rotten fish strung from your neck, as said the sublime Angela de Foligno. And when you leave these churches after speaking to God as a lover speaks to his beloved, you appear like those poorly designed and poorly painted figures on the Way of the Cross, who walk and gesticulate full of pity, against a background of gold. All the thoughts that had been pent up unknown within you, in the caverns of your heart, run out in tumult suddenly like virgins who are mutilated, blind, starving, nude, and sobbing. Ah! Surely at such moments the most horrendous of all martyrdoms would be embraced , and with what rapture.

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