About the rhetorical use of words nothing much need be said. There is rhetoric for good causes and there is rhetoric for bad causes—rhetoric which is tolerably true to facts as well as emotionally moving, and rhetoric which is unconsciously or deliberately a lie. To learn to discriminate between the different kinds of rhetoric is an essential part of intellectual morality; and intellectual morality is as necessary a pre-condition of the spiritual life as is the control of the will and the guard of heart and tongue.
We have now to consider a more difficult problem. How should the poetical use of words be related to the life of the spirit? (And,’of course, what applies to the poetical use of words applies equally to the pictorial use of pigments, the musical use of sounds, the sculptural use of clay or stone—in a word, to all the arts.)
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’ But unfortunately Keats failed to specify in which of its principal meanings he was using the word ‘ truth.’ Some critics have assumed that he was using it in the third of the senses listed at the opening of this section, and have therefore dismissed the aphorism as nonsensical. Zn+ H 2 SO 4 = ZnSO 4 + H 2 . This is a truth in the third sense of the word—and, manifestly, this truth is not identical with beauty. But no less manifestly Keats was not talking about this kind of ‘truth.’ He was using the word primarily in its first sense, as a synonym for ‘ fact,’ and secondarily with the significance attached to it in the Johannine phrase, ‘to worship God in truth.’ His sentence, therefore, carries two meanings. ‘Beauty is the Primordial Fact, and the Primordial Fact is Beauty, the principle of all particular beauties’; and ‘ Beauty is an immediate experience, and this immediate experience is identical with Beauty-as-Principle, Beauty-as-Primordial-Fact.’ The first of these statements is fully in accord with the doctrines of the Perennial Philosophy. Among the trinities in which the ineffable One makes itself manifest is the trinity of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. We perceive beauty in the harmonious intervals between the parts of a whole. In this context the divine Ground might be paradoxically defined as Pure Interval, independent of what is separated and harmonized within the totality.
With Keats’s statement in its secondary meaning the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy would certainly disagree. The experience of beauty in art or in nature may be qualitatively akin to the immediate, unitive experience of the divine Ground or Godhead; but it is not the same as that experience, and the particular beauty-fact experienced, though partaking in some sort of the divine nature, is at several removes from the Godhead. The poet, the nature lover, the aesthete are granted apprehensions of Reality analogous to those vouchsafed to the selfless contemplative; but because they have not troubled to make themselves perfectly selfless, they are incapable of knowing the divine Beauty in its fullness, as it is in itself.
The poet is born with the capacity of arranging words in such a way that something of the quality of the graces and inspirations he has received can make itself felt to other human beings in the white spaces, so to speak, between the lines of his verse. This is a great and precious gift; but if the poet remains content with his gift, if he persists in worshipping the beauty in art and nature without going on to make himself capable, through selflessness, of apprehending Beauty as it is in the divine Ground, then he is only an idolater. True, his idolatry is among the highest of which human beings are capable; but an idolatry, none the less, it remains.
The experience of beauty is pure, self-manifested, compounded equally of joy and consciousness, free from admixture of any other perception, the very twin brother of mystical experience, and the very life of it is supersensuous wonder…. It is enjoyed by those who are competent thereto, in identity, just as the form of God is itself the joy with which it is recognized.
Visvanatha
What follows is the last composition of a Zen nun, who had been in her youth a great beauty and an accomplished poetess.
Sixty-six times have these eyes beheld the changing scenes of
Autumn.
I have said enough about moonlight, Ask me no more.
Only listen to the voice of pines and cedars, when no wind stirs.
Ryo-Nen
The silence under windless trees is what Mallarme would call a creux neont musician. But whereas the music for which die poet listened was merely aesthetic and imaginative, it was to pure Suchness that the self-naughted contemplative was laying herself open. ‘Be still and know that I am God,’
This truth is to be lived, it is not to be merely pronounced with
the mouth. …
There is really nothing to argue about in this teaching; Any arguing is sure to go against the intent of it. Doctrines given up to controversy and argumentation lead of
themselves to birth and death.
Hui Neng
Away, then, with the fictions and workings of discursive reason, either for or against Christianity! They are only the wanton spirit of the mind, whilst ignorant of God and insensible of its own nature and condition. Death and life are the only things in question; life is God living and working in the soul; death is the soul living and working according to the sense and reason of bestial flesh and blood. Both this life and this death are of their own growth, growing from their own seed within us, not as busy reason talks and directs, but as the heart turns either to the one or to the other.
William Law
Can I explain the Friend to one for whom He is no Friend?
Jalal-uddin Rumi
When a mother cries to her sucking babe, * Come, O son, I am
thy mother!’
Does the child answer,’ O mother, show a proof That I shall find comfort in taking thy milk’?
Jalal-uddin Rumi
Great truths do not take hold of the hearts of the masses. And now, as all the world is in error, how shall I, though I know
the true path, how shall I guide? If I know that I cannot succeed and yet try to force success, this would be but another source of error. Better then to desist and strive no more. But if I do not strive, who will?
Chuang Tzu
Between the horns of Chuang Tzu’s dilemma there is no way but that of love, peace and joy. Only those who manifest their possession, in however small a measure, of the fruits of the Spirit can persuade others that the life of the spirit is worth living. Argument and controversy are almost useless; in many cases, indeed, they are positively harmful. But this, of course, is a thing that clever men with a gift for syllogisms and sarcasm find it peculiarly hard to admit. Milton, no doubt, genuinely believed that he was working for truth, righteousness and the glory of God by exploding in torrents of learned scurrility against the enemies of his favourite dictator and his favourite brand of nonconformity. In actual fact, of course, he and the other controversialists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did nothing but harm to the cause of true religion, for which, on one side or the other, they fought with an equal learning and ingenuity and with the same foul-mouthed intemperance of language.
The successive controversies went on, with occasional lucid intervals, for about two hundred years—Papists arguing with anti-Papists, Protestants with other Protestants, Jesuits with Quietists and Jansenists. When the noise finally died down, Christianity (which, like any other religion, can survive only if it manifests the fruits of the Spirit) was all but dead; the real religion of most educated Europeans was now nationalistic idolatry. During the eighteenth century this change to idolatry seemed (after the atrocities committed in the name of Christianity by Wallenstein and Tilly) to be a change for the better. This was because the ruling classes were determined that the horrors of the wars of religion should not be repeated and therefore deliberately tempered power politics with gentlemanliness., Symptoms of gentlemanliness can still be observed in the Napoleonic and Crimean wars.
But the national Molochs were steadily devouring the eighteenth-century ideal. During the First and Second World Wars we have witnessed the total elimination of die old checks and self-restraints. The consequences of political idolatry now display themselves without the smallest mitigation either of humanistic honour and etiquette or of transcendental religion. By its internecine quarrels over words, forms of organization, money and power, historic Christianity consummated the work of self-destruction, to which its excessive preoccupation with things in time had from die first so
