Alcott on Jesus and Plato

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

If you had asked Alcott, “Was Jesus divine?”, he probably would have said, “Certainly, and so am I, and so are you, and so are all men and women on the face of the earth.” That would have been a good answer, hardly acceptable to most of his contemporaries.

But then, Alcott’s thought processes, his core assumptions, his perceptions, were often far in advance of his contemporaries. Even today what he writes may seem at first glance opaque, even meaningless. All I can say is, if these quotations seem at first indecipherable, sit with them a little, and see if they do not begin to open up new lines of thought.

&&&

June 11, 1839: “Jesus.

“This, of all lives, is the most refreshing. It quickens hope and faith. What a noble fact this man is! He is the grandest hero of all history. He is the epic genius, developed in all its magnanimity and grandeur. I read of Jesus with the deepest delight. He demonstrates my most exalted ideal of true heroism. He is the bravest of men.

“His grandeur is in his meek self-trust, his constancy to the Soul. How vital his faith in it! How noble his reliance upon it, under all the varied circumstances of his grand life! He carried his principles into practice. He tested them on every occasion. His life was an experiment of the omnipotence of the Soul; and his death was divine!

“Alas, how few apprehend the depth and grandeur of this man’s character! Christendom has made its lofty epic beauty of no effect by its vulgar traditions. I will yet divest it of these, and reveal its glory.”

&&&

March 28, 1850: “My dept to Plato is greater, perhaps than to any mind – greater than to Christ, I sometimes think, whose spirit is an element of humanity but whose genius I did not entertain and comprehend till Plato unsealed my eyes and led me to the study of his fair performance. It was in studies, however, for presenting the mind of Christ to the apprehension of my children in the Masonic Temple – a pleasure and a privilege greater than I can express – that I grew enamoured of the beauty and grandeur of his character, the delicacy and force of his genius, the simplicity and efficacy of his methods. Plato and Christ interpreted each other and the mind of mankind.”

 

More Alcott

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

For the past few days, I have been living among the thoughts of Ibrahim Karim and Bronson Alcott, almost to the exclusion of the world immediately around me. On Sunday, I went to UVA’s beautiful Shannon Library (formerly Alderman) and borrowed Alcott’s Journals and his Letters. A few excerpts. I could cite many more, but there’s only so much writing and typing one wants to do.

&&&

October, 1838: “History is useful to me no farther than I am conscious of the same facts in my own existence. It is in the light of these that I apprehend the facts of history…. Erudition is not insight. It is not what I take upon my memory that sheds light until my soul, but what I see by self-intuition, that makes me wise.”

&&&

April 13, 1839: “Vox populi is not Vox Dei, save where interest or passion are silent. It is the still small voice of the private soul that is authentic. Multitudes always lie. The single man’s oracle is alone authentic.”

&&&

April 22, 1839: “[Theodore] Parker asked me today, on my saying that men must have behaved well in order to have such fine sunshine, what I would do with the Mosaic account, which gives the priority of creation to the elements. I said that was the historical, not genetic, account of the matter. It was the story told in the order of the senses. The man and nature are. The senses begin in the concrete, and analyze from the surface to the center. But this is not the order of generation. The Soul is prior to the elements of nature. It was the Soul which said ”’Let there be light,’ and there was light.” Light is generated from the Soul, and is the base of matter.”

&&&

October 18, 1839: “Individual is the basis of general improvement. The democrats talk of improving the masses, but take small interest in individual reform. They seem to fancy that two or more men together become invested with powers not their own when apart—have somewhat superadded; and so speak of the might and majesty of masses, not of individuals. A rabble is respectable, God-inspired! A man is base, influenced by Beelzebub! Men possess the Godhead in their collective capacity, but apart are demons, whom the State must watch lest they rend it asunder, and the Church disown.

“I read men quite otherwise. I look for the Prince of the Devils in the midst of the mob; for God, in the seclusion of a single soul. Beelzebub rules the masses, God individuals. The Kingdom of Truth is within, not out there in Church or State. Vox populi, vox diaboli.”

&&&

January 14, 1848: [A little premature, but we’ll get there.] “The age of insight and intuition is fast evicting that of observation and inference. From using contentedly the old eyes of a circuitous and painful logic, men are finding the superior power of a direct and instant intuition in all investigations of nature and spirit.

“New eyes for discerning the old things! New instruments for the old implements!

“It is easier to repair the eyes than to mend the spectacles.”

&&&

June 24, 1849: “To say that all things were once created out of nothing is saying nothing has been created, or is.

“The assertion denies, as it undermines, the grounds of all existence, namely Spirit and God, as premise, and is puerile, atheistic, and impious. Spirit creates out of itself.”

 

Alcott on spirit and matter

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Editor Odell Shepard says in a footnote that this entry from Alcott’s journal is “one of the clearest and most compact statements that Alcott ever made in writing of his main metaphysical idea.”

Reading it, I conclude that the guys upstairs that I have been in connection with for so long are themselves Transcendentalists. New England version? German idealists? Who knows? Who cares? All I know for sure is that the day I first opened Walden was a day of instant recognition, though it took me many a long year to grow into it.

Alcott, on Dec. 21, 1835:

I set out from the wide ground of Spirit. This is; all else is manifestation. Body is Spirit at its circumference. It denotes its confines to the external sense; it individualizes, defines Spirit, breaks the Unity into Multiplicity and places under the vison of man parts of the great Whole which, standing thus separate, can be taken in by the mind – too feeble to apprehend the whole at once and requiring all save an individual thing to be excluded at a single view. – Infinitude is too wide for man to take in. he is therefore permitted to take in portions and spread his vision over the wide circumference by little and little; and in these portions doth the Infinite shadow forth itself, God in all and all in God.

I wish the guys upstairs had been able to state so concisely their view of reality; it would have saved me an immense amount of writing and typing!

 

A few thoughts from Alcott’s Journals

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

I have begun reading Odell Shepard’s selection of Alcott’s Journals, which Alcott kept for more than 50 years, and it is like finding an old/new friend. A few samples from the first few pages:

  • The idea that half my life is gone and so little is accomplished worthy a mind and hearty destined for such noble activities and acquisitions, overpowers me. but I soon rise and again plod on my way, hoping and regretting. [11-2-1829, Alcott not quite 30 years old.]
  • … and I see clearly what before was obscured by the gloss of exterior matter: Spirit all in all – matter its form and shadow. [May, 1833]
  • [Comparing America to the rest of the world:] Circumstances are widely different. Man is operating in vastly different external relations. We are spread over a wider space; we have freer air; Nature spreads itself around us on a wider scale; our situation is wholly new. [April 24, 1834]
  • We investigate the qualities or apprehend the laws of this universe to little purpose if the relations which they hold to our being are not made the primary objects of observation and thought. [January, 1835]
  • When God would reveal himself to a people, he entrusts the sacred truth not to that people in their aggregate capacity but to a gifted spirit among them, who transforms it from himself into them. [Jan. 2, 1835]

Someone said that the 19th century was Emerson’s, the 20th, Thoreau’s, but the 21st would be Bronson Alcott’s.  I am beginning to believe it.

Memories, hindsight, self-refinement

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

While working on getting the Bronson Alcott book ready for publication, I came across this journal entry, which amounts to a message in a bottle.

Wednesday, May 26, 2021

5:20 a.m. The smallest disruption of routine can send you off the rails. I am still waiting for my printer’s cartridge to arrive through the mail, and in the absence of being able to print out work materials, I’m sort of stalled on the task of revising Alcott’s first 50 sayings. Perhaps I’d better keep going on the second 50, since I already have them printed up. Yet – something said don’t do it that way, but pause between the two sections.

You gentlemen have anything you’d care for us to do while  we wait for the ink? Or, should I revise on the machine and treat it as a tentative exercise until I can put it onto paper?

You could do that if you wished. It wouldn’t really waste any time, in the end. Or we could talk here, but of course you are somewhat under the same constraints.

No, not so much. Here I would transcribe and send out, and I could print for my own record later. It isn’t a matter of revising on the machine.

Do you hear the humorous echo of your childhood?

I do, in fact. It’s funny how things sneak in, isn’t it? The nuns used to refer to cars as our “machines.” That’s what they called them, and here am I, going on three–quarters of a century later, and I call a computer “the machine,” in much the same way. I wonder what that is about, if anything. Or do you intend to tell us, using that as an example of something?

We could; we don’t need to, but it’s like that  Hemingway short story title.

“I guess everything reminds you of something.” Are you accusing yourselves of plagiarism?

If we didn’t, no doubt you’d be willing do. We smile.

Me too. Well, what, then?

Not everything needs to be a big deal, you realize. Sometimes things you notice are relatively trivial, but even trivial things can prove to be quite illustrative.

Well, I notice that my friend Louis is finding that nearly every Hemingway story he reads sends him back to a very clear memory of something earlier in his life, often something he hadn’t thought of, literally, in decades.

Receptivity is everything. And perhaps that’s our theme du jour, as you like to say: receptivity. It is proverbial that as you age, short-term memories fade in importance, and longer-term memories resurface, often in great detail. Can something that is so universal as to be proverbial be accident? Can it, for that matter, be unmeaningful?

Rhetorical question, I take it.

It is. Not too hard to figure out, given that nothing in life is accidental. All great art contains everything needed, and no more. You think life isn’t art? So if the latter part of your life reminds you of specific and general incidents and themes from earlier in your life, it is superficial for you (anyone) to shrug off the process as “just getting old.” It is far more meaningful to say, “It is part of getting old: What purpose does it serve?”

The second half of life isn’t just a long coasting downhill, putting in time waiting for the curtain. Yes, it often feels that way, we realize.

It’s a long downhill coast if you don’t know how to take it, maybe.

Even there, your non-3D component hasn’t lost the script. Or do you think that this part of you is bored, too? Your life has purpose, from the first minute to the last. It is  increasingly a matter of choice, though it may appear to be the other way around.

Let me clarify that, because you didn’t actually say what I feel you mean. I think you mean, we tend to think our life is one of first greater choices, as life opens up, then of fewer choices, as life closes in. And I know you are talking about our internal life rather than our external life.

That isn’t quite right, but close enough. Your internal and external life, we remind you. are two ways of experiencing the same thing. So in reality they do not diverge. However, in appearance they may, and in function they definitely do, and for good reason.

  • Your physical life (barring “accident” or termination prior to the normal lifespan) is a process of expansion, maturity, contraction.
  • Your mental life is usually experienced as absorption, homeostasis, and either stagnation or generalizing.
  • Your – we’ll call it “spiritual” – life is one of certainty followed by confusion, then proceeding either to new confidence or the assumption that no certainty is available.

These three processes may seem to diverge. They may seem to proceed independently. But, as we say, how could they? Only, each manifests according to its nature, and the manifestations may seem to have nothing to do with one another.

If you will look at your lives as meaningful, undefeated, always in process, and never completed by the completion of a given physical life – we know that may seem paradoxical – you will see your lives in better perspective.

Unlike Yeats, who thought of life as a long preparation for something that never happens.

He wouldn’t have been wrong to say that, provided that he added, “so far as external observers can see, and so far as one expects 3D death to be the end.” And the difficulty here is that it is the end, and isn’t.

Yes. I have the sense of that.

But not everybody does. It is a matter of faith, more than anything, and faith cannot be purchased or stolen or even earned; it is a gift, given or withheld.

By whom, and according to what criteria?

Some other time, perhaps. For the moment, let’s stick to the point.

Life as a given individual does end with 3D death, in that that particular mixture of elements will not return to another 3D life. If it returns, it is as a strand, not as the entire bundle. But it does not end in 3D dearth, in that living is forever, as your old friend [Ed Carter] wrote. The “you” you forge in life is a real achievement; it does not go away. It functions as it always has functioned.

Do you have any reason to feel that your being as it exists at this moment is perfect and needs no further work? To put it another way, do you think there is nothing more you could do, could become, “if only”? Well, it is always that way, up to your last 3D moment, and beyond. But there is a difference between what may be doable in 3D and what may be doable in a larger sphere of action.

This will strike some people as merely words. I have heard someone say you engage in double-talk – which I take to mean, some of your words went dead on her – but still there is the possibility to be guarded against.

The reason your old memories return in or out of context is so you may return to other points in your life. Your added days provide you with added perspective, with added wisdom. If hindsight is 20-20, why not use it?

Use it – I take it – as part of our continuing process of self-refinement, self-creation.

That’s all there is, of course. You will find your “declining years” to be far more satisfying, far more interesting, if you keep in mind that retrospection and rumination is a valid and therefore appropriate activity for this part of your life. The frantic striving to keep your head above water is past; the tangible 3D goals and aspirations are mostly or entirely past. What is now appropriate is the summing-up and the further preparation – for life doesn’t end with 3D death, any more than the 3D world ends with evening.