We too have the regallest
Part of our being,
Far beyond dreaming of,
Hearing of, seeing.
And the Lonely All-Beautiful
Calls to us here:—
"My knights, my commissioned,
My children dear!
"The hell where affrighted,
Enchanted, ye roam,—
Ye set forth to make it
A heaven for my home!"
—And it is Vision, not to mistake mankind for less or other than Deific Essence cruelly encumbered over with oblivion; it is to see the flame of Eternal Beauty and valiant Godhood in all men; and not to rest or sit content without doing something to uncover that Beauty, to rescue that Godhood.—You go into the slums of a great city; and you do not wonder that the God-essence, inmingling and involved in the clay which is (the lower) man, goes there quite distraught and unrecognizable; where life is so far from the great reflexion of the Worlds of Beauty; where the Sun is no bright brother and confidential friend, but a breeder up of pestilences; where the sky is shut away and there are no flowers to bloom;—whether we like it or no, these things, the unperverted manifestations of the formative pressure of the Spirit, are needed to keep men sane. Beauty you must have, to nourish the Divine within you; alas for him that thinks he may attain to the Good or the True, and in a thin meager or Puritan spirit, strives to shut out their divine sister from his needs and aspirations!—But there, in our hideous modern conditions, there is no vision, without or within; so men go mad with fearful lusts and despairs; and it is the van of the Battle, in one sense, between Godhood and Chaos; and reeks with the slaughter and bloodshed and the madness of that conflict; there too the Holy Spirit of Man is incarnate; there the Host of Souls;—but in the shock and din and the carnage, there on the slippery brink of yet unconquered hell,—all the divine descent and ancient glory of the Host is forgotten:—there is no Vision, and the people perish.
(It may seem I go a long way round to come to him; but in reality I am already trying to draw you a character-sketch of the subject of this evening's lecture: to present you the permanent part and significance of a strange incarnation of Vision that appeared in Rome's dark and dying days: the man to whom Saint Gregory Nazianzen, in his grand attack, applied that ringing triplet of epithets I have taken for the title of the lecture: "The Dragon, the Apostate, the Great Mind." Know him first in his impersonality thus: a great white flame of Vision; a tremendous Poet of the Gods in action;—and then, when you come to his personality, with what it might have retained of personality, of hereditary impairments, perhaps, that should have vanished had he lived past his young manhood, these will not hinder you from understanding the greatness and beauty and tragedy of that life apparently wasted. But we shall come to him in our time.)
Back in the sixth century B. C., when all those Great Teachers came: when the forces that until then had been pent up in the Mysteries were suddenly let loose upon the world,—and the more vehement for their having been so pent up, and their now being so let loose;—what a flood of vision they brought with them! In Greece, to rouse up almost at once that wonderful wave of artistic creation; in Persia, to create quickly a splendid and chivalrous empire; in India, (so far as we know) to pervade as an ethical illumination the life of the people for some centuries before manifesting in art or empire; in China, to work in a twofold current, on one side upon the imagination, on the other upon the moral conceptions of the race, until the Chinese manvantara began. Its effect in each case was according to the cyclic position of the country at the time: those, seemingly, being the most fortunate, that had to wait longest for the full fruition. Thus it struck China in the midst of pralaya, and lay in the soil fructifying until the pralaya had passed; then, appearing and re-appearing according to cyclic law, was a saving health in the nation for fifteen centuries at least;—India, I imagine, when the manvantara there some five centuries old, and under a minor shadow; which shadow once passed, it produced its splendors in the Maurya time; and was in all effective for a thousand years. But it came to Persia in the autumn of the great cycle, when the forces it brought had to ripen quickly, and descend at once on to the military (the lowest) plane;—and to Greece just at noon or early summer,—just before the most intellectual moment,—and so there, too, had no time to ripen, but must burst out at once in artistic creation without ever a chance first to work in and affect the moral life of the race. This last is what Pythagoras at Croton had in mind to do: had Croton endured, there would have been a stable moral basis for the intellectual spendors.—I believe that you have here the very archeus and central clue to history. In China, it was enough for Laotse to float his magical ideas, and for confucius to give out his extremely simple (but highly efficient) philosophy, and to provide his grand Example; in India it was enough for the Lord Buddha to teach his wisdom and to found his Order; he might trust the future to them;—For Persia, one cannot say: the facts as to Zoroaster are not enough known; there might seem to have been some failure there too;—but in Greece, it was imperative that Pythagoras should establish his Lomaland; nothing else could save the forces from squandering themselves at once, in that momentous time, on the intellectual and artistic planes, and leaving life unredeemed and unaffected.
Which indeed they did; and thence on it Europe we see century by century vision waning and the world on a downward path, until the moment comes when a new effort may be made. Augustus calls a halt then; moves heaven and earth; works like ten Herculeses, along all lines, to bring about an equilibrium in outer affairs; and so far succeeds that in his time one or two men may have the Vision, at any rate:—Virgil may catch more than glimpses of the Inner Beauty, and leave the outer world a litle less forlorn. But in place of the rush and fine flow of the Grecian Age, what painful strivings we find in the Augustan!—When too, Teachers labor to illumine the vastnesses within; Apollonius; Moderatus; shall we add, the Nazarene?—So the downward tendency is checked; in the following centuries we see a slow pushing upward,—in the heroic effort of the Stoics, not after Vision—that was beyond their scope and ken,—but after at least that which should bring it back,—a noble method of life.
And then, at last, a dawn eastward: and the bugles of the Spirits of the Dawn heard above the Pyramids, heard over the shadowy plains where Babylon was of old;—and out of that yellow glow in the sky come, now that the cycle permits them, masters of the Splendid vision. They come with something of light from the ancient Mysteries of Egypt; with some shining from Star Plato, and from Pythagoras; and at their coming light up the dark worlds and the intense blue deeps of the sky,—wherein you can see now, under their guidance, immeasurable and beautiful things to satisfy the highest cravings of your heart: winged Aeons on Aeons, ring above ring,—mystery emanating mystery, beauty, beauty, from here up to the Throne of the Lonely All-Beautiful.— What growth there had been in Roman Europe, to prepare the way for the spread of Neo-Platonism, I cannot say; but imagine Gnosticism had something to do with it; and that Gnosticism was a graft on the parent stem of Christianity set there by some real Teacher who came later than Jesus. If we knew more of the realities about Simon Magus on the one hand, and Paul of Tarsus on the other, we might have clearer light on the whole problem; at present must be content with saying this much:—that Gnosticism, with its deep mystical truths, emerges into the light of well-founded history about neck and neck with orthodox Christianity; was considered a branch of the same movement, equally Christian; but was at least tinged with esoteric truth, and deeply Hellenized, and perhaps Persianized;—whereas the orthodox branch was the legitimate heir of exoteric Judaism. How much of real vision there may have been in Gnosticism; how much of mere speculation, which is but a step towards vision,—I am not prepared to guess; but have little doubt that Gnostic activities made ready the ground for Neo-Platonism; so that when the latter's Manasaputric light incarnated, it found fit rupas to inhabit.
This was the Lodge's most important effort to sow truth in Europe since Pythagoras. Says even the Enyclopaedia Britannica (without help from Esotericism):
"Neo-Platonism is in one aspect … the consummation of ancient philosophy. Never before in Greek or Roman speculation had the consciousness of man's dignity and superiority to Nature received such adequate expression…. From the religious and moral point of view, it must be admitted that the ethical 'mood' which Neo-Platonisni endeavored to create and maintain is the highest and purest ever reached by antiquity…. It is a proof of the strength of the moral instincts of mankind that the only phase of culture which we can survey in all its stages from beginning to end culminated not in materialism but in the highest idealism."