"Michael J Davis" <?.?@trustsof.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:FFOsceBbXCsHFwGP@trustsof.demon.co.uk.invalid...
> Thank you, Ann. I've just retired, and was looking forward to getting more
> involved in these discussions. But web-based forums seem so tedious and
> more difficult to skip through than this one on my newsreader!
>
> Blessings
>
> Mike
I check in here almost every day. And the old group seems to have left.
Lots of kids crossposting nit-picky nonsense about Narnia.
The Charles Williams moderated list is enjoying a renaissance of sorts just
now. Talking about mysticism and secret societies that Charles Williams was
connected with from 1917 for about 5 or so years. His relationship with
CSL, CSL's opinion about mysticism. And if you have the Collected Letters
Volume I you must read his letter to Cedil Harwood, 28 September 1926.
Harwood and Owen Barfield has become believers in Rudolf Steiner's
Anthroposophy in 1923, according to Hooper's bottom note. This letter
expresses _most_ well thought out reasons why one is ill advised to mess
with the mystical "fringe". 1926, mind you, before CSL's 'conversion'.
An exerpt:
~~"No one is more convinced than I that reason is utterly inadequate
to the richness and spirituality of real things: indeed this is
itself a deliverance of reason. Nor do I doubt the presence, even in
us, of faculties embryonic or atrophied, that lie in an indefinite
margin around the little finite bit of focus which is intelligence--
faculties anticipating or remembering the possession of huge tracts
of reality that slip through the meshes of the intellect. And, to be
sure, I believe that the symbols presented by imagination at it's
height are the workings of that fringe and present to us as much of
the super-intelligible reality as we can get while we retain our
present form of consciousness.
"My scepticism begins when people offer me explicit accounts of the
super-intelligible and in so doing use all the categories of the
intellect. If the higher worlds have to be represented in terms of
number, subject and attribute, time, space, causation etc (and thus
they always are represented by occultists and illuminati), the fact
that knowledge of them had to come through the fringe remains
inexplicable. It is more natural to suppose in such cases that the
illuminati have done what all of us are tempted to do:--allowed their
intellect to fasten on those hints that come from the fringe, and
squeezing them, has made a hint (that was full of truth) into a mere
false hard statement. Seeking to know (in the only way we can know)
more, we know less. I, at any rate, am at present inclined to believe
that we must be content to feel the highest truths 'in our bones': if
we try to make them explicit, we really make them untruth.
"At all events if more knowledge is to come, it must be the wordless
and thoughtless knowledge of the mystic: not the celestial statistics
of Swedenborg, the Lemurian history of Steiner, or the demonology of
the Platonists. All this seems to me merely an attempt to know the
super-intelligible as if it were a new slice of the intelligible: as
though a man with a bad cold tried to get back smells with a
microscope."~~
Not to say the the Inklings, JRRT, Charles Williams, CSL and Barfield didn't
have what someone called a "mystical imagination" that one finds in great
artists.
BTW: Vol III of Collected Letters contains the Great War letters CSL wrote
to Barfield re Anthroposophy, etc. Absolutely riveting stuff!
CONGRATULATIONS! on your retirement, Michael! You can take it from me, it's
a fabulous place in which to be!
Blessings,
Ann
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