1. Appeals to an unsuited authority.
2. The undue
influence of custom.
3. The opinions
of the unlearned crowd.
We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!
― Arthur Miller, The Crucible
The attempt at immanentizing the meaning of existence is fundamentally an attempt at bringing our knowledge of transcendence into a firmer grip than the cognitio fidei, the cognition of faith, will afford; and Gnostic experiences offer this firmer grip in so far as they are an expansion of the soul to the point where God is drawn into the existence of man. This expansion will engage the various human faculties; and, hence, it is possible to distinguish a range of Gnostic varieties according to the faculty which predominates in the operation of getting this grip on God. Gnosis may be primarily intellectual and assume the form of speculative penetration of the mystery of creation and existence, as, for instance, in the contemplative gnosis of Hegel or Schelling. Or it may be primarily emotional and assume the form of an indwelling of divine substance in the human soul, as, for instance, in paracletic sectarian leaders. Or it may be primarily volitional and assume the form of activist redemption of man and society, as in the instance of revolutionary activists like Comte, Marx, or Hitler. These gnostic experiences, in the amplitude of their variety, are the core of the redivinization of society, for men who fall into these experiences divinize themselves by substituting more massive modes of participation in divinity for faith in the Christian sense.
Eric Voegelin |
But ancient Arrogance, or soon or late,
When strikes the hour ordained by Fate,
Breedeth new Arrogance, which still
Revels, wild wantoner in human ill.
--Aeschylus, Agamemnon
I am pleased to be in the book Digital Milton, which, according to Palgrave..."is the first volume to investigate John Milton in terms of our digital present. It explores the digital environments Milton now inhabits as well as the diverse digital methods that inform how we read, teach, edit, and analyze his works. Some chapters use innovative techniques, such as processing metadata from vast archives of early modern prose, coding Milton’s geographical references on maps, and visualizing debt networks from literature and from life. Other chapters discuss the technologies and platforms shaping how literature reaches us today, from audiobooks to eReaders, from the OED Online to Wikipedia, and from Twitter to YouTube. Digital Milton is the first say on a topic that will become ever more important to scholars, students, and teachers of early modern literature in the years to come."
[Please click HERE to view the book's contents]
- Terrance LindallI have been digitalizing Milton through the internet for years with videos and on-line magazines, so I am pleased with the recognition that the outstanding Shakespeare and Milton scholar Professor Hugh Macrae Richmond has afforded me in documenting my achievements in past years to promote the Greatest poem in the English language.In my essay from 2001 "The Epistemological Movement if late 20th Century Art" [please click HERE] I have talked about the digital and although I do not mention Milton, my thoughts actually relate to Milton himself as a poet:Undoubtedly it is heresy to say that Milton's poetry is not a creative act. But Milton himself might not deem me incorrect. After all, did he not have a guide in his "HEAVENLY MUSE?" And, did not Dante have a guide in Virgil? Even Plato in his theory of forms said everything in our world is a reflection of perfect ideas. Undoubtedly I am, as quoted in the Digital Milton book, "...radical and nonconformist." I am not writing and painting to be accepted in our time, but to examine issues in my own way...inspired by my own muse! Unfortunately, progressive thinkers who esteem "tolerance and inclusiveness" on Milton Lists could not tolerate my ideas"It [poetry] is the practicing of the redirection of the energies that form perceptions. But it is not a creative process. It has been determined from the first instant of time in the unfolding of the Historical Will of the mind of God of which we are merely an extension or "aspect." It is an infinite expansion of potentiality and actuality [Aristotle's Metaphysics]. GOD (WILL), a point of nothingness from which all comes, hovers over the realms of possibility, and on the tabula rasa of our universe imposes order on the ideas (perceptions) generated by the action of possibility becoming actuality. Ultimately we cannot break out of the dualistic world by which we define all things. Quine, up at Harvard, attempted to invent a new logic circumventing the paradoxes inherent in non-contradiction. Mixed results. And since computer thinking is based upon the binary, the computer probably cannot transcend it’s own makeup. In that sense, the whole is no more than the sum of it’s parts. And fractal geometry suggests the same." I now think that with quantum computing this transcendence might be possible.
Milton receiving the gift of poetry from God, Terrance Lindall |
Hammer: CarpenterInterestingly enough, the block shape--the polyhedron--is not addressed here. The curious shape (and possible meaning) of that block, however, is very much worth dilating upon. A recent article "Scientists Have Discovered an Entirely New Shape, And It Was Hiding in Your Cells" suggests some new possibilities for considering Dürer's polyhedron. The article describes a three-dimensional shape called the scutoid, which is described as the "twisted prism" shape of cells in epithelial tissue. Here, from the article, is an image of a pair of scutoids:
Compass: Mathematician
Putto with notebook: Grammarian
Keys: Power
Purse: Wealth
Bell: Eternity
Bat: Darkness. Boiled bats were recommended by the ancients as a remedy for melancholy
Wreath: Made from a plant which was believed to be a cure for excessive melancholy
Comet: Sign of Saturn, the god affiliated with melancholy
Magic square: Orderliness of numbers, each line (horizontal, vertical, diagonal) adds up to 34. Thought to be a talisman to attract Jupiter (The god who could heal the effects of Saturn)
1514: The year of the death of Dürer’s mother. Also the date of this print