Hyperion to Bellarmin
There are in life great hours. We look up to them like colossal figures of the future and antiquity, we fight a glorious fight with them, and should we hold our own against them, they then become like sisters and never leave us.
Once we sat together on our mountain, on a stone of the ancient city of this island, and spoke of how here the lion Demosthenes had found his
end, how he’d here with holy self-elected death helped himself to freedom from the Macedonian chains and daggers — ‘That glorious spirit went from this world with a jest,’ one of us cried. ‘And why not?’ I said, ‘there was nothing more for him here; Athens had become Alexander’s whore and the world, like a hart, hounded to death by the great huntsman.’
‘O Athens!’ cried Diotima; ‘there’s many a time I’ve grieved when I gazed across and out of the blue twilight the phantom of the Olympieion rose before me!’
‘How far is it to get there?’ I asked
‘A day’s journey, perhaps,’ Diotima replied.
‘A day’s journey,’ I cried, ‘and I haven’t been there yet? We must go across together straightaway.’
‘Right then!’ cried Diotima; ‘we shall have a fair sea tomorrow, and all’s now still greenness and ripeness.
‘One needs the eternal sun and the life of the immortal earth for such a pilgrimage.’
‘Tomorrow then!’ I said, and our friends agreed.
Early, to the rooster’s song, we set out from the roadstead. We and the world were shining in fresh brilliance. Golden peaceful youth was in our hearts. The life in us was like a newborn isle of the ocean in which the first spring is beginning.
For some time now, under Diotima’s influence, more stability had come into my soul; today I felt it with threefold purity, and the scattered swarming energies were all gathered in one single golden mean.
We spoke together about the excellence of the ancient Athenians, how it arose, in what it consisted.
One said it was the climate that made it; another: art and philosophy; a third: religion and polity.
‘Athenian art and religion, and philosophy and polity,’ I said, ‘are flowers and fruits of the tree, not the soil and the roots. You take the effects for the cause.
‘And anyone who tells me that this was all shaped by the climate should consider that we too still live in it.
‘Less disturbed in every respect, freer from violent influence than any other people on earth, so grew the people of the Athenians. No conqueror weakens them, no military fortune inebriates them, no alien cult dulls them, no hasty wisdom drives them to untimely ripeness.
Left to itself, like the growing diamond, such is their childhood. Almost nothing is heard of them up to the times of Pisistratus and Hipparchus. They took but little part in the Trojan War which, as in a hothouse, prematurely kindled and quickened most of the Greek peoples. — It’s not extraordinary fate that brings forth man. Great and colossal are the sons of such a mother, but beautiful beings, or, what is the same thing, men they never become, or not until late when the contrasts war with each other too harshly for them not to make peace in the end.
‘In exuberant vigour Lacedaemon rushes ahead of the Athenians and for this very reason would also have scattered and dissolved sooner, had not Lycurgus come and with his discipline contained its intemperate nature. And so from then on everything about the Spartan was acquired, all excellence achieved and bought through labour and self- conscious effort, and in as much as one can, in a certain sense, speak of the simplicity of the Spartans, yet it follows naturally that true childlike simplicity was wholly lacking amongst them. The Lacedaemonians breached too soon the order of instinct, they grew out of kind too soon, and so then, with them, discipline too had to begin too soon; for all discipline and art begins too soon where man’s nature hasn’t yet come to ripeness. Perfected nature must dwell in the human child before it enters school, so that the image of childhood may show it the way back from school to perfected nature.
‘The Spartans remained eternally a fragment; for whoever was never a finished child can hardly become a finished man. —
‘True, heaven and earth also did their part for the Athenians, as for all the Greeks, dispensing neither dearth nor abundance. The rays of heaven didn’t fall upon them like a rain of fire. The earth didn’t pamper and ravish them with caresses and lavish gifts as here and there the foolish mother otherwise may do.
‘And then there was the prodigious gesture of Theseus, the voluntary curtailment of his own monarchic power.
‘Oh! such a seed, thrown into the hearts of the people, must beget an ocean of golden grains, and visibly continues even late to burgeon and bear fruit amongst the Athenians.
‘Once again then! that the Athenians grew up so free from violent influence of any kind, on such moderate fare, this is what made them so excellent, and this alone could!
‘Leave man undisturbed from the cradle on! don’t drive him from the enclosing oneness of his being’s bud, out of his childhood’s tabernacle! don’t do too little lest he manage without you and so distinguish you from himself, don’t do too much lest he feel your power or his own and so distinguish you from himself, in short, don’t let man know until late that there are men, that there is something outside himself, for only in this way will he become man. But man is a god as soon as he’s man. And once he’s a god, then he’s beautiful.’
‘Strange!’ cried one of the friends.
‘You've never yet spoken so deeply from my soul,’ cried Diotima.
‘I owe it to you,’ I answered.
‘That’s how the Athenian was man,’ I continued, ‘that’s how he had to become man. Beautiful he came from the hands of nature, beautiful in body and soul, as the saying goes.
‘The first child of human, of divine beauty is art. In art divine man renews and repeats himself. He wants to feel himself, and so he confronts himself with his own beauty. Thus man gave himself his gods. For in the beginning man and his gods were one, when, unknown to itself, eternal beauty was. — I’m speaking mysteries, but they are. —
‘The first child of divine beauty is art. So it was with the Athenians.
‘Beauty’s second daughter is religion. Religion is love of beauty. The wise man loves beauty itself, infinite and all-embracing; the people love its children, the gods, who appear to them in multifarious forms. So it was too with the Athenians. And without such love of beauty, without such religion any state is a shrivelled skeleton without life and spirit, and all thought and deed a tree without a top, a column whose crown has been lopped off.
‘But that it was really the case with the Greeks, and especially the Athenians, that their art and their religion are the true children of eternal beauty — of perfected human nature — and could issue only from perfected human nature, that is clearly evident if one is only willing to consider with an unbiased eye the objects of their holy art and the religion with which they loved and honoured those objects.
‘There are blunders and blemishes everywhere, and so here too. But one thing is certain withal: what one finds in the objects of their art is mostly ripened man. Here there’s not the pettiness, not the monstrousness of the Egyptians and Goths, here there’s human sense
and human form. They sheer off less than others into the extremes of the supersensual and the sensual. Their gods stay more than others within the beautiful mean of man.
‘And as the object, so also the love. Not too servile and not all too familiar! —
‘From the Athenians’ beauty of spirit there followed too the necessary feeling for freedom.
‘The Egyptian bears without pain the despotism of arbitrary power, the son of the North without resentment the despotism of the law, legally enshrined injustice; for the Egyptian possesses from the womb an instinct for servility and idolatry; in the North they have too little faith in the pure free life of nature not to be superstitiously thralled to legality.
‘The Athenian can’t abide arbitrary power because his divine nature brooks no disturbance, he can’t abide legality everywhere because he has no need of it everywhere. Draco isn’t for him. He expects to be treated gently, and has every right to do so too.’
‘Fair enough!’ someone interjected, ‘that I understand, but how this poetic religious people should also come to be a philosophical one, that I don’t see.’
‘Without poetry,’ I said, ‘they would never even have been a philosophical people!’
‘What has philosophy,’ he responded, ‘what has the cold sublimity of that science to do with poetry?’
‘Poetry,’ I said, sure of my case, ‘is the beginning and end of that science. Like Minerva from Jupiter’s head it springs from the poetry of infinite divine being. And so too what is irreconcilable in it will finally flow together again in the mysterious wellspring of poetry.’
‘He’s a paradoxical fellow,’ cried Diotima, ‘yet I sense his meaning. You're both digressing though. It’s Athens we’re talking about.’
‘The man,’ I began again, ‘who has not at least once in his life felt in himself full unsullied beauty, when the powers of his being played into one another like the colours of the rainbow, who has never come to know that only in hours of inspiration all is inmost concord, this man will not even become a philosophical sceptic, his spirit is not even fitted for tearing down, let alone for building up. For believe you me, the sceptic finds flaws and contradiction in all that is thought only because
he knows the harmony of flawless beauty that never is thought. He disdains the dry crust that human reason proffers him well-meaningly only because he’s secretly feasting at the table of the gods.’
‘Dreamer!’ cried Diotima, ‘that’s why you too were a sceptic. But the Athenians!’
‘I was just coming to them,’ I said. ‘The mighty phrase of Heraclitus, ev dtadEeQov eautw (the One differentiated in itself), could have been arrived at only by a Greek, for it is the essence of beauty and before that was found, there was no philosophy.
‘Now one could define, the whole was there. The flower had ripened, one could now dissect.
‘The moment of beauty had now been made known among men, it was there in life and spirit, infinite oneness was.
‘One could take it apart, divide it in the mind, think the divided together afresh, could so come more and more to know the essence of the highest and the best and turn that knowledge into laws for the manifold realms of the mind.
‘Do you see now why the Athenians in particular had also to be a philosophical people?
‘The Egyptian couldn’t. He who doesn’t live loving, and loved by, heaven and earth in equal measure, who doesn’t in this sense live at one with the element in which he moves, is by nature also not so at one with himself and cannot know eternal beauty, at least not so readily as a Greek.
‘Like a sumptuous despot the oriental clime prostrates its inhabitants with its power and its splendour, and before man has even learned to walk he must kneel, before he has learned to talk he must pray; before his heart has found its balance it must bow, and before the spirit is strong enough to bear flower and fruit, fate and nature sap from it all strength with searing heat. The Egyptian’s surrendered before he’s a whole, and so he knows nothing of the whole, nothing of beauty, and what he calls the highest is a veiled power, a ghastly enigma; the dumb dismal Isis is his alpha and omega, an empty infinity, and nought meaningful ever came out of that. Even the sublimest nothing begets nothing.
‘The North, by contrast, drives its nurslings into themselves too soon, and if the spirit of the fiery Egyptian, too wanderlusting, rushes
out into the world, in the North the spirit prepares to return into itself before it’s even ready to fare forth.
‘In the North man must already have sense before even there’s any ripe feeling within him, he imputes to himself the guilt of all things before innocence even has come to its beautiful end; he must become rational, a self-conscious spirit, before he’s a man, a worldly-wise man before he’s a child; the harmony of whole human being, beauty, may not blossom and ripen in him before he’s developed and cultured. Mere understanding, mere reason are ever the kings of the North.
‘But from mere understanding there never came anything sensible, from mere reason never came anything rational.
‘Understanding without beauty of spirit is like a ministering menial who fashions the fence from rough timber, according to plans he’s been given, and nails together the posts that he’s hewn for the garden his master wants to make. The understanding’s whole business is work of necessity. By laying down rules it guards us from folly and wrongness; but being safe from folly and wrongness is not the pinnacle of human excellence.
‘Reason without beauty of spirit, beauty of heart, is like a slave- driver whom the master of the house has set over the servants; he knows as little as the servants what good is served by all the endless toil, and only shouts: ‘Get a move on,’ and is almost loath to see it happen, for in the end he’d have no more driving to do and his part would be played out.
‘From mere understanding comes no philosophy, for philosophy is more than only the limited perception of what is.
‘From mere reason comes no philosophy, for philosophy is more than the blind demand for never-ending progress in the unification and differentiation of whatever it can be applied to.
‘But when the divine ev dladegov eavtw, the ideal of beauty illumines striving reason, it doesn’t demand blindly, it knows why it demands and for what.
‘When, like a May morning into the artist’s workshop, the sun of the beautiful shines for the understanding in its activity, it’s true that it doesn’t rush forth and abandon its work of necessity, yet still it thinks fondly forward to the festal day when it will wander in the quickening light of spring.’
This was as far as I’d got when we landed on the coast of Attica. Ancient Athens now was too much in our minds for us to feel much like orderly talk, and I wondered now myself at the nature of my utterances. ‘How ever did I come,’ I cried, ‘to fetch up on those barren mountain peaks on which you saw me?’
‘It’s always like that,’ replied Diotima, ‘when we're feeling elated. Exuberant energy looks to find work. Young lambs butt their heads together when they’ve had their fill of mother’s milk.’
We now made our way up Lycabettus, for all our haste stopping at times in thought and wonderful anticipation.
It’s good that man finds it so hard to convince himself of the death of what he loves, and likely no one has ever gone to his friend’s grave without some quiet hope of actually meeting the friend there. The beautiful phantom of ancient Athens seized me like the shape of a mother returning from the realm of dead.
‘O Parthenon’ I cried, ‘pride of the world! at your feet lies Neptune’s realm like a vanquished lion, and like children the other temples are gathered around you, and the eloquent Agora and the grove of Academe — ’
‘Can you transport yourself so into the ancient times,’ said Diotima.
‘Don’t remind me of those times!’ I replied; ‘there was divine life and man was the central point of nature. Spring, when it blossomed all around Athens, it was like a demure flower at the virgin’s bosom; the sun rose red with shame over the glories of the earth.
‘The marble rocks of Hymettus and Pentelikon leapt from their slumbering cradle like children from the mother’s womb, and took on form and life under the delicate hands of the Athenians.
‘Nature proffered honey, and the fairest violets and myrtles and olives.
‘Nature was priestess and man her god, and all the life in her and every shape and every sound of hers but a single rapturous echo of the glorious being to whom she belonged.
“Him alone she celebrated, to him alone she sacrificed.
‘And he was worthy of it, whether he sat lovingly in the holy workshop, embracing the knees of the divine image he’d made, or on the headland, on Sunium’s green peak, ensconced amidst the listening disciples, whiling away the hours with lofty thoughts, or he might be
running in the Stadium, or from the speaker’s tribune dispensing, like the storm god, rain and sun and lightning bolts and golden clouds —’
‘Oh look!’ Diotima now suddenly called out to me.
I looked, and could have died at the almighty spectacle.
Like a vast shipwreck when the storms are silenced and the sailors flown, and the body of the shattered fleet lies unrecognizable upon the sandbank, so lay before us Athens, and the orphaned pillars stood before us like the naked tree trunks of a forest which greened still in the evening and then went up in fire in the night.
‘Here,’ said Diotima, ‘you learn to be still about your own fate, be it good or ill.’
‘Here you learn to be still about everything,’ I continued. ‘Had the reapers who mowed this cornfield enriched their barns with its haulms, nothing would have been lost and I should be content to stand here as a gleaner; but who gained by it?’
‘All of Europe,’ replied one of the friends.
‘Oh, yes!’ I cried, ‘they’ve hauled off the pillars and statues and sold them to each other, prizing the noble figures not a little on account of their rarity, the way one prizes parrots and monkeys.’
‘Don’t say that!’ replied the same man; ‘and should they really lack the spirit of all the beauty, it would be because that couldn’t be carried away, couldn’t be bought.’
‘Quite!’ I cried. ‘For that spirit had perished even before the destroyers fell upon Attica. Only when the houses and temples are desolate do the wild beasts venture into the gates and streets.’
‘For anyone who does have that spirit,’ said Diotima consolingly, ‘Athens still stands like a fruit tree in bloom. The artist can easily for himself restore the torso to wholeness.’
The next day we went out early, saw the ruins of the Parthenon, the site of the ancient theatre of Bacchus, the temple of Theseus, the sixteen columns that still remain standing of the divine Olympieion; but what most moved me was the ancient gate through which in former times one came out of the old town into the new, and where once a thousand beautiful people must have greeted each other in a single day. Now you come neither into the old nor into the new city through this gate, and mute and waste it stands there like a dried-up fountain from whose pipes the clear fresh water once sprang forth with a friendly plash.
‘Alas!’ I said, as we went walking round, ‘it’s a splendid game fate plays, is it not, toppling down the temples here and leaving the shattered stones for children to throw about, making the mutilated gods into benches before the peasant’s hut and the tombs here a resting- place for the grazing bull, and such prodigality is more regal than the wantonness of Cleopatra when she drank the molten pearls; but even so, the pity of all that grandeur and beauty!’
‘Dear Hyperion!’ cried Diotima, ‘it’s time for you to leave; you’re pale and your eyes are weary, and it’s useless trying to help yourself with fancies. Come away! out into the green! in amongst the colours of life! that will do you good.’
We went out into the nearby gardens.
The others had fallen into conversation on the way with two British scholars reaping their harvest among the antiquities of Athens, and they were not to be budged. I was happy to leave them to it.
My whole being was uplifted when once again I saw myself alone with Diotima; in a glorious struggle with the sacred chaos of Athens she had prevailed. Like the lyre of the heavenly muse above the warring elements, so Diotima’s still thoughts held sway above the wreckage. Like the moon from a tender cloud, so her spirit rose up from sweet sorrow; the heavenly maiden stood there in her sadness like the flower that breathes out its loveliest fragrance in the night.
On and on we walked, and in the end our walk was not in vain.
O you groves of Angele where the olive tree and the cypress, whispering round one another, cool themselves with friendly shade, where the golden fruit of the citron tree gleams through the dark green, where the swelling grape grows wantonly over the hedge, and the ripe orange, like a smiling foundling, lies on the way! you fragrant hidden paths! you tranquil seats where the image of the myrtle bush smiles from the spring! you I shall never forget.
Diotima and I walked about for a while beneath the glorious trees until a large cheerful glade opened up before us.
Here we sat down. There was a blissful stillness between us. My spirit floated about the divine form of the maiden like the butterfly about a flower, and all my being lightened and became one in the joy of inspiring contemplation.
‘Are you so soon comforted again, you lighthead?’ said Diotima.
‘Yes! yes! I am,’ I answered. ‘What I thought was lost I have, what I languished for, as if it had vanished from the world, is now before me. No, Diotima! the wellspring of eternal beauty hasn’t yet run dry.
‘I’ve told you once before, I no longer need gods and men. I know that heaven is desolate and void, and the earth, which once overflowed with beautiful human life, has almost become like an anthill. But there is still a place where the old heaven and the old earth smile for me. For all gods of heaven and all godly humans of earth I forget in you.
‘What's the shipwreck of the world to me, I know of nothing but my blissful isle.’
‘There’s a time for love,’ said Diotima in gentle earnest, ‘as there’s a time to live in the happy cradle. But life itself drives us out.
‘Hyperion!’ — here she ardently seized my hand, and her voice was raised with grandeur — ‘Hyperion! it seems to me that you are born for higher things. Do not misjudge yourself! it’s the lack of material that’s held you back. Things didn’t move quickly enough. That cast you down. Like the young fencers you’d lunge too soon, before your aim was yet sure and your hand skilled, and since, as is only natural, you took more hits than you gave, you became chary and doubted yourself and all things; for you’re as sensitive as you're hotheaded. But thereby nothing is lost. Had your mind and your actions matured so early, your spirit would not be what it is; you would not be the thinking man, had you not been the suffering one, the man in ferment. Believe me, you would never so clearly have come to know the equilibrium of beautiful humanity, had you not so utterly lost it. Your heart has found peace at last. I’ll believe it. I understand it. But do you really think you’ve now reached your end? Will you lock yourself up in the heaven of your love and leave a world which has need of you to wither and grow cold beneath you? Down you must like the ray of light, like the all-refreshing rain you must descend into the land of mortality, you must illumine like Apollo, shake and quicken like Jupiter, or you are not worthy of your heaven. I beg you, go back into Athens once again, and this time look at the people there walking about amongst the ruins, the raw Albanians and the other good artless Greeks, who console themselves with a merry dance and a pious fable for the vile oppression that weighs down on them — can you say: “I’m ashamed of this material”? I think it could still prove malleable after all. Can
you turn away your heart from those in need? They’re not evil, they’ve done you no harm!’
‘What can I do for them?’ I cried.
‘Give them what you have within you,’ Diotima replied, ‘give — ’
‘Not a word, not a word more, great soul!’ I cried, ‘else you will sway me, else it will be as if you’d forced me to it —
‘They won't be happier, but nobler, no! they'll be happier too. They must come forth, they must rise like young mountains from the surging sea, driven by their subterranean fire.
‘It’s true I stand alone and come unrenowned among them. Yet just one who is a man, can he not do more than hundreds who are only fragments of men?
‘Holy nature! you are the same within me and without. It cannot be so hard to unite what is without with the divine that is within me. If the bee can build its thriving little realm, then why shouldn’t I be able to plant and raise what’s needed?
‘What? the Arab merchant sowed his Koran and there grew up for him like an endless forest a people of disciples, and that field should not also flourish where the ancient truth shall come again in newly quickened youth?
‘Let there be fundamental change! From humanity’s roots let the new world spring! Let a new godhead rule over them, a new future brighten before them.
‘In the workshop, in the home, in the assemblies, in the temples, everywhere let there be change!
‘But first I must go forth to learn. I’m an artist, but I lack the craft. I can mould in my mind, but I haven’t yet learned to direct my hand — ’
‘You shall go to Italy,’ said Diotima, ‘to Germany, France — how many years do you need? three — four — I should think three are enough; you're not of the slow sort, and will be seeking out only the greatest and most beautiful —’
‘And then?’
‘You will become the educator of our people, you'll be a great man, I hope. And when I then embrace you like this, then I’ll dream as if I were a part of the glorious man, then Tl rejoice as if you had gifted me, like Pollux to Castor, half of your immortality, oh! I shall become a proud maiden, Hyperion!’
I fell silent for a while. I was filled with ineffable joy.
‘Is there then contentment between the decision and the deed,’ I finally resumed, ‘is there a calm before the victory?’
‘It’s the calm of the hero,’ said Diotima, ‘there are decisions which, like the dicta of the gods, are command and fulfilment in one, and such is yours. —’
We walked back, as after our first embrace. Everything had become strange and new for us.
Now I stood over the ruins of Athens like the farmer on the fallow field. ‘Just lie peaceful,’ I thought, as we took ship again, ‘just lie peaceful, slumbering land! Soon young life will green from you and wax towards the blessings of heaven. Soon the clouds will no more rain in vain, soon the sun will find again its ancient progeny.
‘Do you ask after men, nature? Do you lament like a lyre which the brother of chance, the wind alone plays, since the artist who kept it in tune is dead? They will come, your men, nature! A rejuvenated people will rejuvenate you too, and you will become as its bride, and the ancient covenant of spirits will renew itself with you.
‘There will be but one beauty; and humanity and nature will unite into one all-embracing godhead.’
un puvaı, TOV anavra vıxa Aoyov. To O’eTTEL Pavn, Pryvaı XEWEV, ODEV TLEQ TIXEL, TOAV DEVTEQOD WG TAXLOTA.
SOPHOCLES [Not to be born is, past all prizing, best. But when a man has seen the light
of day, this is the next best by far, that with the utmost speed he should go back whence he came.]