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Page 1 of 101913 · PDF PAGE 352
… brother, and he pardons you your jealousy, and embraces you with tears. Children of true believers, we will sing with you: “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His prophet!” Say with the children of Israel: “There is no God but God, and Moses is His prophet!” Say with the Christians: ‘There is no God but God, and Jesus Christ is His prophet!” Mohammed is the shadow of Moses. Moses is the fore- runner of Jesus. What is a prophet? A representative of humanity seek- ing God. God is God, and man is the prophet of God, when he causes us to bel…
1913 · PDF PAGE 315
…rselves; it will be done to us as we have believed; that is to say, we create ourselves in the image of our ideal. “Those who make their gods become like unto them,” says the psalmist, ‘‘and all they that put their trust in them.” The divine ideal of the ancient world made the civilization which came to an end, and one must not despair of seeing the god of our barbarous fathers become the devil of our more enlightened children. One makes devils with cast-off gods,' and Satan is only so incoherent and so formless because he is made up of all the…
1913 · PDF PAGE 344
THE EQUINOX Here is a translation in alexandrines of the unrestricted magical and Catholic creed :— I do believe in God, almighty sire of man, One God, who did create the universe, his plan. I do believe in Him, the Son, the chief of men, Word and magnificence of the supreme Amen. He is the living thought of Love's eternal might, God manifest in flesh, the Action of the Light, Desired in every place and every period, But not a God that one may separate from God. Descended among men to free the earth from fate, He in His mother did the woman con…
1913 · PDF PAGE 365
…the inauguration of the reign of the Holy Ghost upon the earth. XIX THE NUMBER NINETEEN Ir is the numberof light. It is the existence of God proved by the very idea of God. Either one must say that Being is the universal tomb where, by an automatic movement, stirs a form for ever dead and corpse-like, or one must admit the absolute principle of intelligence and of life. Is the universal light dead or alive? Is it vowed fatally to the work of destruction, or providentially directed to an immortal birth ? If there be no God, intelligence is only …
1913 · PDF PAGE 310
FIRST ARTICLE SOLUTION OF THE FIRST PROBLEM THE TRUE GOD Gop can only be defined by faith; science can neither deny nor affirm that He exists. God is the absolute object of human faith. In the infinite, He is the supreme and creative intelligence of order. In the world, He is the spirit of charity. Is the Universal Being a fatal machine which eternally grinds down intelligences by chance, or a _providential intelligence which directs forces in order to ameliorate minds? The first hypothesis is repugnant to reason; it is pessimistic and immoral.…
1913 · PDF PAGE 327
…ce; one throbs with a new life, and one fears no more to die. For prayer is the eternal life of intelligence and love; it is the life of God upon earth. Love one another—that is the Law and the Prophets! Meditate, and understand this word. And when you have understood, read no more, seek no more, doubt no more—love ! Be no more wise, be no more learned—love! That is the whole doctrine of true religion; religion means charity, and God Himself is only love. I have already said to you, to love is to give. The impious man is he who absorbs others. …
1913 · PDF PAGE 375
…of things, is impossible. Such is the profound reason of the apparent absurdity of symbolism. Let us give an example: If faith said that God was impersonal, one might conclude that God is only a word, or, at most, a thing. If it is said that God was a person, one would represent to oneself the intelligent infinite, under the necessarily bounded form of an individual. It says, ‘‘God is one in three persons,” in order to express that one conceives in God both unity and multiplicity. The formula of a mystery excludes necessarily the very intellige…
1913 · PDF PAGE 314
…fic, half hypothetical; half reason, and half poetry. This dogma has been, and will always be, the father of all others. What is the Man-God? He who realizes, in the most human life, the most divine ideal. Faith is a divination of intelligence and of love, when these are directed by the pointings of nature and of reason. It is then of the essence of the things of faith to be inac- cessible to science, doubtful for philosophy, and undefined for certainty. Faith is an hypothetical realization and a conventional determination of the last aims of h…
1913 · PDF PAGE 382
THE EQUINOX We have translated, and not destroyed, the worship of Moses and of the prophets. In adoring God in creation, we do not adore the creation itself. In adoring God in Jesus Christ, it is God alone whom we adore, but God united to humanity. In making humanity divine, Christianity has revealed the human divinity. The God of the Jews was inhuman, because they did not understand Him in His works. We are, then, more Israelite than the Israelites them- selves. What they believe, we believe with them, and better than they do. They accuse us o…
1913 · PDF PAGE 583
…e and inexplicable secret—is the absolute knowledge of good and of evil. “When you have eaten the fruit of this tree, you will be as the gods,” said the Serpent. ABSURDITE “Tf you eat of it, you will die,” replied Divine Wisdom. Thus good and evil bear fruit on one same tree, and from one same root. Good personified is God. Evil personified is the Devil. To know the secret or the formula of God is to be God. To know the secret or the formula of the Devil is to be the Devil. 285
1913 · PDF PAGE 351
… MYSTERIES the nations, do you rest immobile, guardians of the tombs of your fathers? Your fathers are not here, they are risen: for the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, is not the God of the dead ! Why do you always impress upon your offspring the bloody sigil of the knife? God no longer wishes to separate you from other men; be our brethren, and eat with us the consecrated Bread of peace on altars that blood stains never. The law of Moses is accomplished: read your books and understand that you have been a blind and hard-hearted race, …
1913 · PDF PAGE 316
…cal and rebellious as the angel of light. He himself cut the umbilical cord of his simplicity, and, falling free upon the earth, dragged God with him in his fall. And therefore, from this sublime fall, he rises again glorious, with the great convict of Calvary, and enters with Him into the kingdom of heaven. For the kingdom of heaven belongs to intelligence and love, both children of liberty. God has shown liberty to man in the image of a lovely woman, and in order to test his courage, He made the phantom of death pass between her and him. Man …
1913 · PDF PAGE 486
…intelligence, and which is itself only a light borrowed from the Absolute. It is a remarkable thing that Julian has ideas of the Supreme God, that the Christians thought they alone adored, much greater and more correct than those of some of the fathers of the Church, who were his contemporaries, and his adversaries. This is how he expresses himself in his defence of Hellenism : “It is not sufficient to write in a book that God spake, and things were made. It is necessary to examine whether the things that one attributes to God are not contrary …
1913 · PDF PAGE 386
THE EQUINOX God of the Christians under the figure of a man with an ass’s head. Christians will shrug their shoulders when they see this knavery, and pray God for the poor ignorants who imagine that they insult them. M. the Count Joseph de Maistre, after having, in one of his most eloquent paradoxes, represented the hangman as a sacred being, and a permanent incarnation of divine justice upon earth, suggested that one should raise to the old man of Ferney a statue executed by the hangman. There is depth in this thought. Voltaire, in effect, als…
1913 · PDF PAGE 377
… complete, dogma which has ever been produced in the world. Let science and reason grant us so much; we shall ask nothing more of them. “God exists; there is only one God, and He punishes those who do evil,” said Moses. “God is everywhere; He is in us, and the good that we do to men we do it to God,” said Jesus. “ Fear” is the conclusion of the dogma of Moses. “Love” is the conclusion of the dogma of Jesus. The typical ideal of the life of God in humanity is incarnation. Incarnation necessitates redemption, and operates it in the name of the re…
1913 · PDF PAGE 116
… in the empyrean Plectron of the primal pzean! I am the eternal one Winged and white, the flowering rod, I the fountain of the sun, Very God of very God! Iam he that lifteth up Life, and flingeth it afar; I have filled the crystal cup; I have sealed the silver star. I the wingless God that flieth Through my firmamental fane, Iam he that daily dieth, And is daily born again.
1913 · PDF PAGE 437
…quence of a sentence of death. The most wicked men, being the most unhappy of all, seemed to him to offer the sublimest of expiations to God. He broke all bounds in his attack on all repression and all damnation. “A religion which damns,” he cried, “is a damned religion!” He further preached the most absolute licence under the pretext of charity, and so far forgot himself as to say, that the most imperfect and the most apparently reprehensible act of love was worth more than the best of prayers. It was the Marquis de Sade turned preacher!? Furt…
1913 · PDF PAGE 391
THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES God has become man, that is to say, that the Infinite has made itself finite, that the Eternal died, that God punished his innocent Son for the sin of guilty men... . FAITH. Say no more about it. As enunciated by you, these propositions are in fact absurdities. Do you know what is the number of God, you who do not know God? Can you reason about the operations of the unknown? Can you under- stand the mysteries of charity? I must always be absurd for you; for, if you understood them, my affirmations would be absorbed by y…
1913 · PDF PAGE 381
…e of all absurdities. Remain the objections of dissent. The Jews, our fathers in religion, reproach us with having attacked the unity of God, with having changed the immut- able and eternal law, with adoring the creature instead of the Creator. These heavy reproaches are founded on their perfectly false notion of Christianity. Our God is the God of Moses, unique, immaterial, infinite God, sole object of worship, and ever the same. Like the Jews, we believe Him to be present everywhere, but, as they ought to do, we believe Him living, thinking a…
1913 · PDF PAGE 193
…nd the bitter flood Of thy tears is dying away, away, away, Beyond the hills, the hidden hills of day. These are but lilies, O my silent god ; Where thy feet have trod Upon the earthly way They have sprung, And the songs that have been sung Are faded with the day. My little heap of ashes, thou wast god, Yea, utterly wast thou god! So there are no more roses, no more roses ; There shall be no more songs to thee, Lord of the lilies and the silent sea Of Time. No rime This night brings to thee: closes The hour in dusk; there is no song sung to the…