The risk of choosing for our symbol a form, a figure, a gesture, a
name, offered us by history, is that it should carry with it too many
of the false accretions of accident, chance, the passions of
controversy and the hypocrisies of malice. But after all the
anonymous creative spirit of the generations is so full of the
wisdom of the earth and so involved with the rhythmic inspiration
of innumerable souls, that it would seem better to risk the presence
of certain sinister accretions, than to risk the loss of so much
magical suggestiveness.
If we do select for our symbol such a form, such a shape, such a
gesture and such a name, as history may offer, we shall at any rate
be always free to keep it fluid and malleable and organic. We shall
be free to plunge it, so to speak, again and again into the living
reality which it has been selected to represent. We shall be free to
extricate it completely from all its accretions of chance and
circumstance and material events. We shall be free to extricate it
from all premature metaphysical syntheses. We shall be free to
draw it from the clutches of dogmatic religion. We shall be free
to make it, as all such symbols should be made, poetical
and mythological and, in the aesthetic sense, shamelessly
anthropomorphic. Above all we shall be completely free, since it
represents for us those sons of the universe who are the
embodiment of the creative energy, to associate it with every
aspect of the life of the soul. We shall be free to associate it with
those aspects of the soul which in the process of its slow invention
by the generations have, it may be, been disassociated from it and
separated from it. We shall be free to use it as a symbol for the
fuller, complete life of the future, and for every kind of revolt,
into which the spirit of creation may drive us, against the evil
obscurantism and malicious inertness which resist the power of
love. The conclusion to which we are thus led, the choice which
we are thus compelled to make, is one that has been anticipated
from the beginning. No other name except the name of Christ, no
other figure except the figure of Christ, can possibly serve, if we
are to make any use of history at all, as our symbol for the sons of
the universe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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