Again, this law that the truth is found in the balance of the
antinomies appears in man's equal passion for continuity and
permanency and for variety and change. The book of Revelation tells
us that the redeemed, before the great white throne, standing upon the
sea of glass, sing the song of Moses and the Lamb. What has the one
to do with the other? Here is the savage, triumphant chant of the far
dawn of Israel's history, joined with the furthest and latest possible
events and words. Well, it at least suggests the continuity of the
ageless struggle of mankind, showing that the past has its place
in the present, relieving man's horror of the impermanence, the
disjointed character of existence. He wants something orderly and
static. But, like the jet of water in the fountain, his life is
forever collapsing and collapsing, falling in upon itself, its
apparent permanence nothing but a rapid and glittering succession of
impermanences. The dread of growing old is chiefly that, as years
come on, life changes more and faster, becomes a continual process of
readjustment. Therefore we want something fixed; like the sailor with
his compass, we must have some needle, even if a tremulous one, always
pointing toward a changeless star. Yet this is but one half of the
picture. Does man desire continuity?--quite as much does he wish for
variety, cessation of old ways, change and fresh beginnings. The
most terrible figure which the subtle imagination of the Middle Ages
conjured up was that of the Wandering Jew, the man who could not die!
Here, then, we arrive at knowledge, the genuine values of experience,
by this same balancing of opposites. Continuity alone kills; perpetual
change strips life of significance; man must have both.
Now, it is in the religious field that this interests us most. We have
seen that what we have been doing there of late has been to ignore the
fact that reality is found only through this balancing of the law of
difference and identity, contrast and likeness. We have been absorbed
in one half of reality, identifying man with nature, prating of his
self-sufficiency, seeing divinity almost exclusively as immanent in
the phenomenal world. Thus we have not merely been dealing with only
one half of the truth, but that, to use a solecism, the lesser half.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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