The Catholic World, Vol. 11, April, 1870 to September, 1870Various
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 11, April, 1870 to September, 1870
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
In the Catholic Church we have found the real presence, and unity,
and catholicity which we sought long and earnestly, and could find
nowhere else, and which Mr. Emerson, after a still longer and equally
earnest search, has not found at all. He looks not beyond nature,
and nature is not catholic, universal, or the whole. It is not one,
but manifold and variable. It cannot tell its origin, medium, or
end. With all the light Mr. Emerson has derived from nature, or
from nature and soul united, there is infinite darkness behind,
infinite darkness before, and infinite darkness all around him. He
says, "Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic of those
inquiries he would put." Suppose it is so, what avail is that to him
who has lost or never had the key to the hieroglyph? Knows he to
interpret the hieroglyph in which the solution is concealed? Can he
read the riddle of the sphinx? He has tried his hand at it in his
poem of the Sphinx, and has only been able to answer that
"Each answer is a lie."
It avails us little to be told where the solution is, if we are not
told what it is, or if only told that every solution is false as soon
as told. Hear him; to man he says,
"Thou art the unanswered question;
Couldst see thy proper eye,
Alway it asketh, asketh;
And each answer is a lie:
So take thy quest through nature,
It through a thousand natures ply;
Ask on, thou clothed eternity;
Time is the false reply."
The answer, if it means any thing, means that man is "a clothed
eternity," whatever that may mean, eternally seeking an answer to the
mystery of his own being, and each answer he can obtain is a lie; for
only eternity can comprehend eternity and tell what it is. Whence
has he learned that man, the man-child, is "a clothed eternity," and
therefore God, who only is eternal?
Now, eternity is above time, and above the world of time,
consequently above nature. Catholicity, by the very force of the
term, must include all truth, and therefore the truth of the
supernatural as well as of the natural. But Mr. Emerson denies the
supernatural, and does not, of course, even profess to have any
knowledge that transcends nature. How, then, can he pretend to have
attained to catholic truth? He himself restricts nature to the
external universe, which is phenomenal, and to soul, by which he
means himself. But are there no phenomena without being or substance
which appears or which shows itself in them? Is this being or
substance the soul, or, in the barbarism he adopts, the ME? If so,
the NOT-ME is only the phenomena of the ME, and of course identical
with myself, as he implies in what he says of the "one man." Then in
me, and emanating from me, are all men, and the whole of nature. How
does he know this? Does he learn it from nature?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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