But what we are concerned with noting now is that just as the
primordial malice of all the souls it contains continually poisons
the universe, so the primordial love of all the souls it contains
continually redeems and transforms the universe. In other words it
is no exaggeration to say that the unfathomable universe is
continually undergoing the same ebb and flow between love and
malice, as are the souls and bodies of all the living things whereof
it is composed.
And what precisely is the attitude of love towards the physical
body? Does it despise the physical body? Does its activity imply
an ascetic or a puritanical attitude towards the body and the
appetites of the body? The truth is quite the contrary of this. What
the revelation of the complex vision indicates is that this loathing
of the body, this revulsion against the body, this craving to escape
from the body, is a mood which springs up out of the eternal
malice. It is from the emotion of love in its attitude to the body
that we arrive at the idea of the sacredness of the body and at the
idea of what might be called "the eternal reality of the body."
This idea of the eternal reality of the body springs directly from
those ideas of truth, beauty and goodness which are pre-existent in
the universe and therefore springs directly from that emotion of
love which is the synthesis of these.
The forms and shapes of stars and plants and rivers and hills are
all realized and consummated in the form and shape of the human
body. The magic of the elements, the mystery of earth and air and
water and fire, are incarnated in this miracle of flesh and blood. In
the countenance of a human child, in the countenance of a man or
a woman, the whole unfathomable drama of life is expressed. The
most evil of the children of men, asleep or dead, has in his face
something more tragic and more beautiful than all the waters and
all the land.
Not to "love" flesh and blood, not to will the eternal existence of
flesh and blood, is not to know "love" at all. To loathe flesh and
blood, to will the annihilation of flesh and blood, is to be a victim
of that original "motiveless malignity" which opposes itself to the
creative force.
This insistence upon "the eternal idea of the body" does not
necessarily limit "the idea of the body" to the idea of the human
body; but practically it does so. And it practically does so because
the human body evidently incarnates the beauty and the nobility of
all other forms and shapes and appearances which make up our
existing universe.
There may be other and different bodies in the unfathomable
spaces of the world; but for those among us who are content to
deal with the actual experiences which we have, the human body,
summing up the magical qualities of all other terrestrial forms and
shapes, must, as far as we are concerned, remain our permanent
standard of truth and beauty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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