Chapter 48

Now Rome was very old; and, since Augustus' day, the detritus had grown and grown. Diocletian had devoted a political sagacity amounting in some respects to genius to setting things right, and had accomplished something. He had moved out of Rome itself, where the psychic atmosphere was too thickly encumbered; had gone eastward, where the air, after long pralaya, was clearer; had propped up imperial authority, now for the first time, with the definite insignia of imperial state: wore a tiara, was to be kneeled to, addressed as _Dominus,_ and so forth:--all outward expedients, and Brummagem substitutes for that inner adjustment which Laotse called Tao: the Way that you are to seek by retreating within, and by advancing boldly without; and not by any one road, because it is not found by devotion alone, nor by religous contemplation alone, or by ardent progress, self-sacrificing labor, or studious observation of life, alone; but the whole nature of man must be used wisely by the one who desire to enter it. Diocletian knew nothing of this; so, great statesman as he was, his methods were effective only while he sat on the throne; in his old age and retirement he had to watch, from his palace at Spalato, the empire he had piloted banging about in a thousand storms again; and to plead in vain to those to whom he had given their thrones for the safety and life of his own wife and daughter;--the total failure of his life and labors thus miserably brought home to him before he died.

"Where there is no vision the people perish," said that learned Hebrew of old, King Solomon; and by that one saying proclaimed his right to his title of 'the Wise.' Look into it, and you have almost the whole philosophy of history. The incessant need of humanity is this thing _Vision:_ men and nations go mad for lack of it: they seek in hell the joys of heaven which should be theirs, and which they cannot see. It means vision of the Inner Worlds, of the heaven that lies around us. Oh, nothing spooky or foolish; one is far from meaning the Astral Light. People who go burrowing into that are again seeking a substitute for Vision, and a very poisonous one.--If I may speak of a personal experience: coming to Point Loma from London was like coming from the bottom of the sea into the upper ether. There, in the heart of that old civilization, the air is thick with detritus; here--if only because a long pralaya and fallow time have made the land new,--the detritus is negligible; perhaps it is not even forming, but consumed as we go; because at least we have glimpses of the Way. Result: the mental outlook that extended there, in visionary moments, to some six inches, before one's nose, here has broadened out to take in some seas and mountains; in comparison, it runs to far horizons. I take it that this is the experience of us all. So this is what that wise Solomon meant: "When the detritus has accumulated to the point where, like a thick fog, it shuts away all vision of the True, then the nation must go into abeyance; it must fall."--Rome was very near that point.

One wishes one could say something about those Inner Worlds of Beauty. When the voices of self are silenced, and desires abashed and at peace,--how they shine through! This outer world, truly, reflects them; but another and ugly world of our own making.

.....is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon, The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers,-- For this, for everything, we are out of tune.

Sometimes; not always, thank God! Look again: there are the mountains, and above them the mournful glories of the anti-sunset; the mute and golden trumpetings of the dawn; --there is the sea, and over it the wistfulness and pomp and pageantry of the setting sun, and the gentleness of heaven at evening;--there is the whole drama of Day with its tremendous glories; and the huge mystery of Night-time: Niobe Night, silent in the heavens,

"Glittering magnificently unperturbed;"

--and there are the flowers in the garden, those _Praelarissimi_ and _Nobilisimi_ in the Court of God, the Pansy, the Blue Larkspur, the Purple Anemone;--and what are all these things?-- Just symbols; just mirrorings of a beauty in the World of Ideas within; just places where the Spirit has touched matter, and matter, at that fiery and creative touch, has flamed up into the likeness of God, which is Beauty.--What is Vision?--It is to have luminous forms rising in the imagination, like Wordsworth had, like Shelley; it is with shut eyes to see the beauty and wonder of the Gods; it is to have no grayness or dearth or darkness within; but to have the 'bliss of solitude' crowded with beautiful squadrons of deities, trembling with the light of legions on legions of suns. For:

Not all we are here Where this darkness oppresses us; Not this oblivion Of Beauty expresses us.

Gaze not on it, To be stained with its stain; The Lonely All-Beautiful Calls us again.

In galleried palaces, Turquoise blue, With the sweetness of many suns Filtering through,--

In the Suns's own garden, Where galaxies flame For lilac and daffodil, Each on his stem,--

Where apple-bloom Capricorn Hangs from his tree, Glittering dim o'er The dim blue sea,--

And billowing dim o'er The dim blue lawns Of heaven come the nebular Sunsets and dawns,--

We too have the regallest Part of our being, Far beyond dreaming of, Hearing of, seeing.

And the Lonely All-Beautiful Calls to us here:-- "My knights, my commissioned, My children dear!

"The hell where affrighted, Enchanted, ye roam,-- Ye set forth to make it A heaven for my home!"

--And it is Vision, not to mistake mankind for less or other than Deific Essence cruelly encumbered over with oblivion; it is to see the flame of Eternal Beauty and valiant Godhood in all men; and not to rest or sit content without doing something to uncover that Beauty, to rescue that Godhood.--You go into the slums of a great city; and you do not wonder that the God-essence, inmingling and involved in the clay which is (the lower) man, goes there quite distraught and unrecognizable; where life is so far from the great reflexion of the Worlds of Beauty; where the Sun is no bright brother and confidential friend, but a breeder up of pestilences; where the sky is shut away and there are no flowers to bloom;--whether we like it or no, these things, the unperverted manifestations of the formative pressure of the Spirit, are needed to keep men sane. Beauty you must have, to nourish the Divine within you; alas for him that thinks he may attain to the Good or the True, and in a thin meager or Puritan spirit, strives to shut out their divine sister from his needs and aspirations!--But there, in our hideous modern conditions, there is no vision, without or within; so men go mad with fearful lusts and despairs; and it is the van of the Battle, in one sense, between Godhood and Chaos; and reeks with the slaughter and bloodshed and the madness of that conflict; there too the Holy Spirit of Man is incarnate; there the Host of Souls;--but in the shock and din and the carnage, there on the slippery brink of yet unconquered hell,--all the divine descent and ancient glory of the Host is forgotten:--_there is no Vision, and the people perish._

(It may seem I go a long way round to come to him; but in reality I am already trying to draw you a character-sketch of the subject of this evening's lecture: to present you the permanent part and significance of a strange incarnation of Vision that appeared in Rome's dark and dying days: the man to whom Saint Gregory Nazianzen, in his grand attack, applied that ringing triplet of epithets I have taken for the title of the lecture: "The Dragon, the Apostate, the Great Mind." Know him first in his impersonality thus: a great white flame of Vision; a tremendous Poet of the Gods in action;--and then, when you come to his personality, with what it might have retained of personality, of hereditary impairments, perhaps, that should have vanished had he lived past his young manhood, these will not hinder you from understanding the greatness and beauty and tragedy of that life apparently wasted. But we shall come to him in our time.)

Back in the sixth century B. C., when all those Great Teachers came: when the forces that until then had been pent up in the Mysteries were suddenly let loose upon the world,--and the more vehement for their having been so pent up, and their now being so let loose;--what a flood of vision they brought with them! In Greece, to rouse up almost at once that wonderful wave of artistic creation; in Persia, to create quickly a splendid and chivalrous empire; in India, (so far as we know) to pervade as an ethical illumination the life of the people for some centuries before manifesting in art or empire; in China, to work in a twofold current, on one side upon the imagination, on the other upon the moral conceptions of the race, until the Chinese manvantara began. Its effect in each case was according to the cyclic position of the country at the time: those, seemingly, being the most fortunate, that had to wait longest for the full fruition. Thus it struck China in the midst of pralaya, and lay in the soil fructifying until the pralaya had passed; then, appearing and re-appearing according to cyclic law, was a saving health in the nation for fifteen centuries at least;--India, I imagine, when the manvantara there some five centuries old, and under a minor shadow; which shadow once passed, it produced its splendors in the Maurya time; and was in all effective for a thousand years. But it came to Persia in the autumn of the great cycle, when the forces it brought had to ripen quickly, and descend at once on to the military (the lowest) plane;--and to Greece just at noon or early summer,--just before the most intellectual moment,--and so there, too, had no time to ripen, but must burst out at once in artistic creation without ever a chance first to work in and affect the moral life of the race. This last is what Pythagoras at Croton had in mind to do: had Croton endured, there would have been a stable moral basis for the intellectual spendors.--I believe that you have here the very archeus and central clue to history. In China, it was enough for Laotse to float his magical ideas, and for confucius to give out his extremely simple (but highly efficient) philosophy, and to provide his grand Example; in India it was enough for the Lord Buddha to teach his wisdom and to found his Order; he might trust the future to them;--For Persia, one cannot say: the facts as to Zoroaster are not enough known; there might seem to have been some failure there too;--but in Greece, it was imperative that Pythagoras should establish his Lomaland; nothing else could save the forces from squandering themselves at once, in that momentous time, on the intellectual and artistic planes, and leaving life unredeemed and unaffected.

Which indeed they did; and thence on it Europe we see century by century vision waning and the world on a downward path, until the moment comes when a new effort may be made. Augustus calls a halt then; moves heaven and earth; works like ten Herculeses, along all lines, to bring about an equilibrium in outer affairs; and so far succeeds that in his time one or two men may have the Vision, at any rate:--Virgil may catch more than glimpses of the Inner Beauty, and leave the outer world a litle less forlorn. But in place of the rush and fine flow of the Grecian Age, what painful strivings we find in the Augustan!--When too, Teachers labor to illumine the vastnesses within; Apollonius; Moderatus; shall we add, the Nazarene?--So the downward tendency is checked; in the following centuries we see a slow pushing upward,--in the heroic effort of the Stoics, not after Vision--that was beyond their scope and ken,--but after at least that which should bring it back,--a noble method of life.

And then, at last, a dawn eastward: and the bugles of the Spirits of the Dawn heard above the Pyramids, heard over the shadowy plains where Babylon was of old;--and out of that yellow glow in the sky come, now that the cycle permits them, masters of the Splendid vision. They come with something of light from the ancient Mysteries of Egypt; with some shining from Star Plato, and from Pythagoras; and at their coming light up the dark worlds and the intense blue deeps of the sky,--wherein you can see now, under their guidance, immeasurable and beautiful things to satisfy the highest cravings of your heart: winged Aeons on Aeons, ring above ring,--mystery emanating mystery, beauty, beauty, from here up to the Throne of the Lonely All-Beautiful.-- What growth there had been in Roman Europe, to prepare the way for the spread of Neo-Platonism, I cannot say; but imagine Gnosticism had something to do with it; and that Gnosticism was a graft on the parent stem of Christianity set there by some real Teacher who came later than Jesus. If we knew more of the realities about Simon Magus on the one hand, and Paul of Tarsus on the other, we might have clearer light on the whole problem; at present must be content with saying this much:--that Gnosticism, with its deep mystical truths, emerges into the light of well-founded history about neck and neck with orthodox Christianity; was considered a branch of the same movement, equally Christian; but was at least tinged with esoteric truth, and deeply Hellenized, and perhaps Persianized;--whereas the orthodox branch was the legitimate heir of exoteric Judaism. How much of real vision there may have been in Gnosticism; how much of mere speculation, which is but a step towards vision,--I am not prepared to guess; but have little doubt that Gnostic activities made ready the ground for Neo-Platonism; so that when the latter's Manasaputric light incarnated, it found fit rupas to inhabit.

This was the Lodge's most important effort to sow truth in Europe since Pythagoras. Says even the _Enyclopaedia Britannica_ (without help from Esotericism):

"Neo-Platonism is in one aspect ... the consummation of ancient philosophy. Never before in Greek or Roman speculation had the consciousness of man's dignity and superiority to Nature received such adequate expression.... From the religious and moral point of view, it must be admitted that the ethical 'mood' which Neo-Platonisni endeavored to create and maintain is the highest and purest ever reached by antiquity.... It is a proof of the strength of the moral instincts of mankind that the only phase of culture which we can survey in all its stages from beginning to end culminated not in materialism but in the highest idealism."

It asserted the Gods, the great stars and luminaries of the Inner World; it asserted the Divinity of Man,--superior, truly, as the _Encyclopaedia_ says to (the lower) Nature, but of the Higher, one part or factor in the whole. It came into Europe trailing clouds of splendor and opening the heavens of Vision. The huge menace and perils of the age, the multiplying disasters, were driving men to seek spiritual refuge of some kind; and there were, in the main, two camps that offered it:--this of Neo-Platonism, proclaiming Human Divinity and strong effort upward in the name of that; and that other which proclaimed human helplessness, and that man is a poor worm and weakling, originally sinful, and with nothing to hope from his own efforts, but all from the grace, help, or mercy of Extracosmic Intervention. It was a terribly comfortable doctrine, this last, for a race staggering towards the end of its manvantara under a fearful load of detritus, a culture old and thoroughly tired. No wonder Europe chose this path, and not the Neo-Platonist path of flaming idealism and endeavor. Ammonius, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus,--they had worked wonders; but not the crowning wonder of that which could save the age and the age to come: Plotinus had failed of that, because there no tool at hand for the Gods, but a silly, weak Gallienus.--So now Constantine has made the great change; and the empire that was Roman is now Roman no longer: You owe your first allegiance now, not to the state or to the emperor at its head, but to an _imperium_ within the state which claims immunity from laws and duties: the kingdom is divided within itself, and must look for the fate of divided kingdoms. Zeus on Olympus now weighs the Roman empire in his scales,--and finds the fate is death, and no help for it: there are to be thirteen decades of moribundity, and then Christian burial, with Odoacer and sundry other the like barbarians to be mourners and heirs; and then,--blackest night over the western world for God knows how long: night, with nightmare and horror, and no Vision, no beautiful dreams, no refreshment, no peace. For the party that Constantine has now made dominant despises cordially all the ancient light of Hellenism; Aeschylus, Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Euripides,-- everyone you could in any sense a light-bearer that came of old, to bring mankind even the merest brain-mind culture,--these people condemn and abhor for heathen, and take pleasure in the thought that they are now, and have been since they died, and shall be forever, frizzling in the nether fires: they condemn the substance of their writings, and will draw no ideas, no saving grace, from them whatever;--will learn from them nothing in the world but grammar and eloquence with which to thunder at them and all their like from barren raucous pulpits. So, Vision having gone, culture is to go too, and all you can call civilization; and therewith law and order, and the decencies of life: all that _soap_ stands symbol for is to be anathema maranatha; all that the Soul stands symbol for is to be anathema maranatha;--a pretty prospect! Zeus sighs in heaven, and his sigh is a doleful thunder prophetic of the gloom that is to overspread all the western skies for many centuries to come.

--And then comes Helios, the Unconquered Sun, and lays a hand on his arm, and says: "Not so fast!; Never despair yet; look down--_there!_"

And the Gods look down: to a gloomy castle upon a crag in the wild mountains of Cappadocia; and they see there a youth, a captive banished to that desolate grand region: well-attended, as befits a prince of the royal blood, but lonely and overshadowed; --not under fear, because fear is no part of his nature; but yet never knowing when the order for his death may come. They read all this in his mind, his atmosphere. They see him deep in his books: a soul burning with earnestness, but discontented, and waiting for something: all the images of Homer rising about him beckoning on the one hand, and on the other a grim something that whispers, These are false; I alone am true! --"What of him?" says Zeus; "he too is a Christian."--"Watch!" says Sol Invictus; "I have sent my man to him."--And they watch; and sure enough, presently they see a man coming into this youth's presence, and pointing upwards towards themselves; and they see the youth look up, and the shadow pass from his eyes as a great blaze of light and splendor breaks before him,--as he catches sight of them, the Gods, and his eye meets theirs, and he rises, illumined and smiling;--and they know that in the Roman world there is this one man with the Grand Vision; this man who may yet (if they play their cards well) wear the Roman diadem;-- that there is vision in the Roman world again, and it may be the people shall not perish.

It was Julian, "the Dragon, the Apostate, the Great Mind"; I thank thee, Gregory of Nazianzus, for teaching me that word!--and the one that came to him there in Cappadocia was Maximus of Smyrna, Iamblichus' disciple. His story has been told and re-told; I expect you know it fairly well. How he was a son of Julius Constantius, son of Constantius Chlorus,--and thus a nephew of Constantine the Great, and a first cousin to the Octopus-Spider-Maiden Aunt Constantius then on the throne;--how he because of his infancy, and his half-brother Gallus because of a delicate constitution which made it seem impossible he should grow up, were spared when Constantius had the rest of the family massacred;--how he was banished and confined in that Cappadocian castle;--of Gallus' short and evil reign that ended, poor fool that he was, in his being lured into the spider-web of Constantius and beheaded;--how Julian was called then to the court at Milan, expecting a like fate;--how he spent seven months there, spied on at every moment, and looking for each to be his last;--how he was saved and befriended by the noble Empress Eusebia (a strangely beautiful figure to find in those sinister surroundings);--and sent presently to the University of Athens, there to spend the happiest moments of his life;--then called back to be made Caesar: he who had never been anything but a student and a dreamer, called from his books and dreams at twenty-four, and set to learn (as Caesar) his elementary drill,-- which he found very difficult to learn indeed;--and then sent to fight the Germans in Gaul. How Constantius tried always to thwart him while he was there: setting underlings over him with power to undo or prevent all he might attempt or do;--how in spite of it all he fought the Germans, and drove them across the Rhine, and followed them up, and taught them new lessons in their own remote forests; and took the gorgeous Chnodomar, their king, prisoner; and sent for him, prepared to greet friendlily one so great in stature and splendid in bearing; but was disgusted when the gentleman, on coming into his presence, groveled on the floor and whined for his life,--whereupon Julian, instead of treating him like a gentleman as he had intended, packed him off to his (Chnodomar's) old ally the Maiden Aunt at Milan to see what they would make of each other;--how he fought three campaigns victoriously beyond the Rhine; restored the desolated Cisrhenish No-man's land, and brought in from Britain, in six hundred corn-ships, an amount Gibbon calculates at 120,000 quarters of wheat to feed its destitute population.--And this fact is worth nothing: if Britain could export all that wheat, it surface was not, as some folks hold, mainly under forest: it was a well-cultivated country, you may depend, with agriculture in a very flourishing condition,--as Gibbon does not fail to point out.