Psychic Geographical Society: Philosophy Bulletin 2
Yakov Rabinovich
Non-Difference
Looking-Glass World
The Greeks possess an underserved unique prestige as thinkers. As we have seen, the Egyptians and Hebrews had already grappled with the problems of existence as earnestly as anyone, but they did so (respectively) mythologically and morally. The Greeks, independently of their predecessors, took up same struggle, but philosophically and scientifically, which gives their formulations, for us, a clarity that can make the priests of Thebes and Jerusalem seem obtuse.
But in fact, Greek philosophy, setting aside its rational presentation, is not essentially different from Egyptian. For Hellas too, the great puzzler was change and death, though the Greeks attempted to control these through philosophical abstraction rather than mythological narrative. There is no need to here recap Plato and Aristotle, their antecedents and successors, because the main points have been so thoroughly absorbed over the millennia as to form the basic preconceptions of Western spirituality and Western science.
What is of interest to us here is the least Greek of the Greeks, the fifth century BC philosopher Heraclitus, who anticipated the next great epoch in philosophy, the one that would begin with Kant. Only then would a real synthesis of Egyptian night and Hebrew day , the physical opacity of myth and the moral clarity of prophecy, become possible. Such a synthesis was the dream of the Hermeticists: to achieve an intellectual inner illumination, a gnosis, that would allow us to see the world shining like the new Jerusalem, not by sunlight or moonlight, but shadowlessly, like the figures in medieval painting, visible through their own intrinsic brilliance.
Egypt understood change as a magical but still quite physical process: in a sense, an alchemical one. Moses saw change as the essential and noteworthy medium of the examined, moral life. The Greeks, like a secular version of the Egyptians, viewed all change as an inanimate, almost chemical process, which could be encompassed by the laws of physics (though to us they look more like metaphysics, the Greeks’ ideas are no less empirical for being quaintly expressed.) The Renaissance Hermeticists, the first deliberate and self-aware alchemists, hoped, by a synthesis of Hebrew, Greek and Egyptian wisdom, to transmute base, dead matter, with its soulless motion, into living, flowing “potable gold.” They never achieved this in actuality — because they tried to do so literally. They could not do more, because they lacked the trick of transcendence, which requires not a transformation in the thing but in the observer.
All literalism is a hunger for the real, a poets’ “road of excess” leading at best to the servants’ entrance to the palace of wisdom. Obviously admission would be denied there to a beggarly throng of wild-eyed prophets, ragged philosophers, and alchemists from the streets of Thebes — or Renaissance Rome. Admittedly, such beggars do obtain the occasional crumb. But the thought that moral goodness, philosophic certainty, and the immanence of the gods are volatile, ever changing into their opposites — this sends such beggars scuttling in terror back to their scriptures, their logical proofs, and their cults. Hermeticism is, after all, no more than a philosophical inflation of the cult of Thoth-Hermes.
Heraclitus, who looked as deeply as any man into the secret process that underlies reality, becoming, said,
We know health by illness, harm by good, satisfaction only by hunger, leisure by fatigue. The same road goes both up and down; the beginning of a circle is also its end.
Heraclitus understood reality, not primarily in terms of its physical but its conceptual mutability. All our determinations are subjective, they are what they are for us. But in themselves, “hot” or “up” or “good” mean nothing. When we understand that our valuations depend largely on who is evaluating, we see that they could as well be viewed as their opposites. An ocean is quite dry enough for a fish. Anything that we consider stable and correct can be fairly seen as a point of balance between opposite extremes, which are not in fact extremes or opposites! The Tao De Jing makes essentially the same observation.
It is because every one under Heaven recognizes beauty as beauty, that the idea of ugliness exists.
And equally, if everyone recognized virtue as virtue, this would merely create fresh conceptions of wickedness.
For truly, Being and Not-being grow out of one another;
Difficult and easy complete one another.
Long and short test one another;
High and low determine one another.
Front and back give sequence to one another.
Therefore, the Sage relies on actionless activity. . .
(We need not assume that this insight, made independently in Greece and China at roughly the same time, is just another subjective one. When we recognize our own subjectivity, we achieve a provisional objectivity, and make a real advance towards absolute truth.)
But neither Heraclitus nor Lao Tzu fully realized what they had uncovered. The former worked his discovery back into archaic physics, and the latter into mystical quietism, both of them oblivious to the potential they had unleashed. And this very potential is what makes Heraclitus and Lao Tzu seem the most modern of the ancient thinkers. They pointed out not only the relativism of our ideas — which would have been mere skepticism. They also revealed thought as a living process that exactly parallels that which we see in the physical world.
Until the rise of modern philosophy with Kant, the main topic for philosophers was being. It was assumed that the outside world presented itself completely to our view, that we need only analyze it adequately to understand it fully. Kant’s “critical philosophy” was critical of precisely this assumption. He took into account, for the first time, the fact that the world we know is the world only insofar as it is knowable through our senses and the structures of our minds. The suprasensory aspects, the ones that are not matters of sense-certainty , like sequence in time or causality in space, are orderings we impose on the data we take in through our senses. They are not necessarily real outside our minds. This may seem a little over-skeptical: we push something hard enough, it falls over. Where is the lack of certainty there? Kant would reply that the repetition of a phenomenon is not a proof of its necessity. I might give a modern parallel to Kant’s argument by noting that the idea of causality is good enough for everyday purposes, but not for advanced physics. It’s like rounding off pi to get a useful formula for engineering, which doesn’t do justice to the very different rules that obtain in the worlds of irrational and transcendental numbers. Handy rules of thumb based on limited practical experience are not axioms. Regardless of whether we are willing to go as far as Kant in his skepticism, his argument requires a better response than “that’s just stupid, everyone knows better.” In fact, one may take it as an axiom that anything that everyone knows is not better.
To offer a simpler equivalent of Kant’s explanation for the illusion of logic in the world we can experience: our minds are designed to unify and synthesize sensory data, to combine (as it were) images and sound track, to cut and edit episodes, producing an experience of life that is as coherent as a movie, and just as artificial. In reality itself, even time and space probably don’t exist, though we find them necessary to think. Abstract truths, even scientific ones, match the limited data we have, but that doesn’t mean they entitle us to assume they are objectively true. And moral and metaphysical truths are even more dubious propositions.
These are the insights Kant presents with the clarity of a geometry textbook and the dignified tact of a physician. But his skepticism was devastating to all the metaphysical systems built up since Plato. He raised the problem of subject and object, and unlike Heraclitus or Lao Tzu, fully acknowledged its importance. What we know, we only know subjectively; what objectively is “out there,” is beyond our perception and our perception-based sense of necessary order.
What Kant did was is restate the old problem of “being” in reverse. Egypt, Israel and Greece expressed it in terms of the transitory versus the eternal. In terms of anarchic activity versus right action, in terms of matter versus spirit. All three ancient cultures assumed that the physical world is a chaos of mutability, and that certainty is to be found in ideas (though Egypt could only express these in symbols.)
Kant re-presents the same picture, but seen from the other side. Outer reality is the real and certain, absolutely existing in itself (an sich). Our minds are the welter of inadequate and mutable ideas, the dubious illusions of sense perceptions and rational inferences.
Kant is able to make his new critical philosophy in the (mirror) image of old metaphysics, because he does not repeat or replace earlier thought. Rather, he completes it. Whether we focus, like Plato, on the shiftiness of the physical world, or, like Kant, on the subjectivity of our evaluations of it, we are talking about the same thing: the impossibility of confining the infinite living world in finite forms, physical or intellectual. Exactly the same problem, the disparity between what we know and what we know to be certain, arises both when we look outwards at the physical and when we gaze inwards to the conceptual. The conclusion is inescapable: the outer and the inner, which look more alike the closer we look at them, are the same. But if we view the situation from two sides at once, we do not end up as before, passively contemplating an incomprehensible chaos. Rather, we see that the world is mindlike, and the mind recapitulates the structure of the world.
The German Idealists, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, pursued (to Kant’s horror) the implications of Kant’s insights. Inspired by Hermeticism, which they knew primarily through Paracelsus and Jakob Boehme, they made decisive new use of two alchemical conceptions. One was man as microcosm, which catalyzed their ability to understand the oneness of the physical world and the exactly parallel intellectual one glimpsed in Kant’s critical mirror. The second alchemical conception was that of the Great Work, in which the “life” of matter is accelerated, through all the stages of maturation, through death, to resurrection as the world-transmuting Philosopher’s Stone. The Idealists viewed the reciprocal refutations of subjective and objective reality as necessary moments in the life of matter and the self realization of Man the microcosm. Following this mystical itinerary, Man could become the likeness of the whole, “made in the image of God.” The mind of man could become the alembic in which the mind transfigures itself.
The dead ends of Egyptian repetition, Mosaic legislation, and even classical physics, are essential moments in the process by which thought rises above itself , refuting yet re-incorporating its old ideas, in an ever ascending progression. This is the life of the mind seen as an initiatory ordeal, with anguished wanderings and symbolic deaths in labyrinths of logic, attaining at last the center: absolute knowing.
When we look back at the German Idealists, contemporaries of Napoleon, we are apt to imagine their achievements against the background of Beethoven’s Fifth. But the music, and ideas, that inspired their lives were not those of their contemporaries but those they grew up with. We will understand the idealists better in terms of that eighteenth-century fantasia, The Magic Flute.
The Future of Shamanism
It may be asked whether a complex exposure of the mind’s limitations, such as Kant stopped at, which the idealists made the basis of their nearly occult philosophy — it may be asked whether this is really useful today, when science has demonstrated its decisive mastery of reality’s content. But the belief in science is most general among those who understand it least. The less people comprehend the results achieved in mathematics and medicine, the more they are awed, but this amounts to nothing more respectable than a belief bullied into being by miracles. What science can do is not at issue; rather, what it means. Which re-opens the problem of reason.
Applied independently, empirical reasoningg cannot (as Kant meticulously demonstrated) yield knowledge of what absolutely and universally is — Reality and God. Even granting more than Kant would, the certainty of God’s existence, reason, which does nothing but limit to define, can do no more than offer a negative theology: it can say only what God is not. Did Hegel really achieve more? Of God we can only say that he is absolute, unconditioned — pure negations. And this vast “not” precludes any helpful connection between the divine and human concerns. Hegel, despite the exertion of his dialectics, only told us what God is not yet. The “God of the philosophers” remained a very literally dispiriting prospect.
As we note anew the boundaries of reason, we would do well to remember that the inscrutability of the suprasensible, which puts it beyond proof, likewise protects it from disproof. Whether we assert that God’s existence is a given or a taken, a fact or an unwarranted assumption, we have no means of logically enforcing agreement with our position. This observation, centuries after Kant introduced it, is so common as to be entirely boring. It’s just weary agnosticism. Everyone assents, not least because insight into the shortcomings of rational thought seems to spare us the trouble of thinking further.
The Tao Te Jing makes the same points, in a few lines of beautiful verse, and then proceeds to lead us, in edified bewilderment, through the portals of mystery to an intuitive, glamorously, exotic, passive and rather agnostic contemplative path. Lao Tzu has already sneakily slain logic (if we accept his premises), no one is in a position to complain that the his conclusion does not follow very directly from its premises. The same agnostic impasse bedevils our rational science — a few old laws are superseded, and nothing is sure any more. And somehow this authorizes scientists to write jejune books about Taoism.
The silence we find after reason ceases its chatter brings out all Man’s horror vacui, his dread of empty space, whether it is a literal expanse of sand or a reasoned annihilation of our faith in reason and science. Myth and image rush in to fill the void. Even the astronauts, first faced by the endless black gap, read aloud the first chapter of Genesis, with better taste than one would have expected from their training. Nor will my readers be cheated of the visual extravaganzas that traditionally arise from this encounter with emptiness. But before I introduce the thunders and wonders, it would be well, for the first time perhaps, to analyze this most important interval which precedes all new creation.
Every shaman, and all the great prophets, seceded from human society to a place of silence where they could hear the voice of God. Moses ascended far above the desert to Sinai’s height to receive the Torah. Jesus spent his forty days in the wilderness. In Ramadan of 610 Mohammad had withdrawn for his customary solitary meditations to the cave called Hira on mount Jabal al Noor when the angel Gabriel first appeared to him on the Night of Power (Lailat ul Qadr), and said to him “Iqra!” - “Recite!” from a roll of silk bearing letters of fire.
Recite! For your Lord is
bountiful,
who, by the pen, taught man what he knew not.”
— the first verses of the Koran to be revealed.
In modern times, René Descartes, who looks out to us from the Franz Hals' painting with the dazed yet steadfast cheer of a musketeer on anti-depressants, the father of modern mathematics and philosophy, made a similar and equally portentous retreat. His preparation for the journey led him through the soundless world of geometry, a sort of "Sweeney among the Polygons," and resulted in a manifesto infinitely more poetic and less familiar than Rimbaud’s Season in Hell. Through a self-imposed program of “hyperbolic doubt” Descartes ( I summarize here his own writings, summarizing much but inventing nothing)disbelieved in the physical world until nothing remained but the “still small voice” of himself thinking himself.
Under the impression that he was re-establishing the existence of God on a truly scientific basis, Descartes (I summarize here his own writings, inventing nothing) proceeded to envision the world as an intellectual Manichaean theme park, populated by soulless automata. Tick-tock dogs and clockwork cows in a dead mechanical landscape. Even the self-impelled armatures which are human beings were uneasily propelled by inexplicably embodied pure intellects. An all-powerful demon pulled the strings of this wind-up world while keeping it fogged entirely over in delusion. In the center of this realm stood a gigantic tree of knowledge, whose roots are mathematic axioms and whose topmost ramifications are the liberal arts. Though all this detail is beside my point, it is worth mentioning to counteract Descartes’ quite undeserved reputation for dryness and difficulty, and, more importantly, to show that the shamanic experience is not lost to us moderns: it has moved into the realm of philosophy. An historian of religion will immediately recognize in Descartes’ imagery the classic features of the shamanic journey: the entry into the world of the dead, the replacement of mortal organs (in this case the brain) by immortal ones, “a being that thinks,” and arrival at the tree at the center of the world.
What concerns us is that, in utter the emptiness, there always sounds out a voice. The deepest secrets of what it has to say about existence, man and the cosmos are to be sought, not immediately in its divine utterance, but in the very fact of language itself, which is a thing impossible.
The Last Metaphysician
In the following I will avail myself of the syntheses offered by the twelfth-century Spanish Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi and especially the nineteenth century German idealist Schelling, extricating their highly compatible insights from the specialized language and intellectual limitations of their contexts. These men can truly be viewed as the successors of Moses, Jesus and Mohammad as revealers of God’s word. The relevance of these thinkers to traditional prophecy should become at least plausible when we consider that the German Protestant and the Sufi Mystic in question share common intellectual roots in Biblical tradition. Further, they are also deeply imbued with a Neo-Platonism which was enormously influential on the religions of the Book from the late Biblical period on.
Schelling is of particular importance among the idealists, as the last European philosopher in the grand metaphysical tradition, the most deliberately mystical idealist thinker. Though nowadays this is a considerable point of interest, it contributed to his early overshadowing by the far more political and secular idealist Hegel. To this day “real” philosophers defend Schelling only as a precursor of Existentialism!
As Schelling teaches, God is a perfect unity. He is pure being, all that is, and in him spirit and matter both exist absolutely and inseparably. In Him, reality corresponds precisely to concept: even to think of God is to avow his existence. The difficulty with which Western theology has struggled over the millennia, insofar as it has labored to express it explicitly in concept rather than obliquely in myth, is the derivation of the real world from the ideality of God who contains it. Ibn Arabi offers that everything, insofar as it has being, is God, and the gradations of existence are due to a gradual enfeeblement of being as it descends from God, though our world which is mixed with nonbeing, until it shades off into utter nothingness. This view is accurate, and explains the immediate problem of the world’s emanation from God: the world is not other than God, and so does not emerge from him: rather it continues him. Ibn Arabi does address the complexity and doubleness of existence, but for him this problem exists only in our minds, as we strive to reconcile God’s unity, that fact that all that is, is God, and his incomparability, the fact that particular things express and so limit God. They are of Him, but do not comprise Him. Nothing that is is not God, but all things are God to varying degrees.
Adequately formulated, from God’s perspective, which Ibn Arabi arrived at honestly by developing his views immediately from the monist declarations of the Koran. Yet it does not do full justice to the world as we experience it. For all its limitations, reason is what we use to understand the world, and the view of utter unity is for us a transcendent insight that dismisses the greater part of what we actually encounter in life.
Schelling, coming to the problem more with a philosophic rather than a religious viewpoint, likewise saw the material world as well as the spiritual world as already contained within God. They are equal partners in God’s being. One is not a fainter or more derivative version of the other. Schelling sets forth in terms consonant with our experience the interaction between these two aspects of God’s self-disclosure, and how they unite into a unity outside of which nothing remains. Ibn Arabi arrived at this same correct conclusion, but Schelling showed the process by which the conclusion may be intellectually achieved, not simply taken on faith. I have already noted that reason alone is incapable of reaching such a conclusion: it stops short at the vision of the world as a chaos of opposites, physical and intellectual in turn, depending on one’s viewpoint. Schelling made this his starting point, and solved the problem by taking it as the solution. (Hegel adopted this from his mentor Schelling, and his more detailed working out of Schelling’s thought as dialectic is an unsurpassable education in how to think. But Hegel would finally come down so decidedly on the secular side as to reduce his Schellingian symbolic insights to little more than metaphors, and leave him defending the cool and brutal utopianism of the Enlightenment as embodied in the Prussian state.)
The world is a twofold disclosure of the one God who appears to us as both real and ideal. These two seemingly different principles always strive to manifest their actual unity. Thus matter, with its ineluctable logic and regularity, its necessity and determinism, cannot but take on form, and so is intrinsically knowable. Viewed from “out there”, from the point of view of the ideal, matter is knowledge concretized: it is literally solid with Truth, and the more complex its forms, the more informatively truthful they become until they reach the level of spirit.
Looking at the same situation from “in here,” from the point of view of material being, we see spirit asserting itself as matter as it expresses its content in ever nobler forms, from molecules up through man. And once we reach man, spirit can take on a nearly immaterial form as ideas. The very words we use to describe the act of understanding attest the vestigial physicality of thought. Spirit may be contemplated, but an idea is grasped. Language is a slightly more material version of thought, and so it may be passed from mind to mind.
Regardless of whether we view the world from “up there” or “down here,” whether we see spirit as manifesting downwards into the material world, or whether we see it as evolving out of matter, we find the midpoint of spirit an matter in thinking, speaking man.
With man, the midpoint expands to the horizon: the point fills the planet. With thought and language activity can be deliberate, and merits the name of action. If action is completely deliberate and chosen, it involves spirit completely in the material. The fusion of freedom and necessity, where one acts and is not merely acted upon, is properly called goodness. Thus Prospero:
Though with their high wrongs I
am struck to th' quick,
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part: the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose
doth extend
Not a frown further.
Prospero, in this regard a tragic hero, rising above the memory of his sufferings, achieves freedom within necessity. Free will now assumes its rightful place, not, as in Protestant theology, as the explanation of evil, but as the source of goodness. Goodness is action manifesting its potential infinity. Infinity, because it is not limited by finite determining causes. This is, to use an old-fashioned phrase, the effect of grace.
Another way of describing the unity of the real (what is true) and the ideal (what is free) is beauty. We can see it in the work of the artist who balances the laws of his craft with the free element of individual creation. In fact, art is philosophy made visible. Art is literally revelation, and intrinsically religious. An analysis of modern art, the open secret and most exasperating mystery of our time, will set forth, at large and in full color, deep and useful insights into how we may live in a transfigured world, one charged with meaning and value. This will show why wisdom, virtue and also an aesthetic sense, are all to be expected of the priest, while the mere professions may be adequately fulfilled by a single one of these traits.
Is Not My Word Like as a Fire?
I return now to Sinai and the voice of God expressing itself in Biblical Hebrew. Though the event is assuredly miraculous, a more pertinent if less spectacular miracle is language itself. No individual creates language: it is part of the natural world. Just as spirit manifests itself materially as form, it does so ideally as language. Language is, as it were, the matter of the spirit world. To borrow from archaic physics, one might say that, in language, air (breath) becomes fire, which consumes what it touches (sound), that is, it lifts the material into the infinite. Language, like the flame of an altar, dissolves its content skywards into the resonant chaos of absolute unity — that is, meaning and form become one. Language is able to combine such opposites because it contains simultaneously in itself all possible tones and sonorities: it is confusedly rhythmic, harmonious and melodic, hidden qualities which poetry makes temporarily evident and intelligible.
The chaotic, between-the-worlds nature of language may be expressed more clearly: it is at once fully abstract and fully concrete. We bear witness to this as of as we use the same word, Man, to express mankind in general and a given particular man. Within language all things are one.
It is in acknowledgement of this that the Koran frequently ends a passage by with the declaration “these are clear aya for people who reflect.” The Arabic word aya means at the same time verse, sign, proof and miracle. In the same spirit the more Gnostic parts of the New Testament describe Jesus as the logos, a Greek word which means at once “word,” “system” and “the underlying logic of all existence.” Adam’s naming of the animals was what made them fully real. Speech is the explicit entry of spirit into the material world, and the first word uttered already implied all that might be said.
Turning to the Book of Genesis, we read how God spoke the world into existence when all was without form, void and dark. From our present perspective we can understand God’s utterances, starting with “Let there be light!”, not as the termination of chaos but its adequate expression. The state described as shapeless empty darkness is not nullity but every possibility. The negative terms applied to the pre-creation (that is, pre-manifest) cosmos define the limits of our ability to grasp an utter unity of opposites, one that comprises them without annulling them, in what Schelling calls “a state of non-difference,” and which we recognize as the completeness of God.
This is how the miracle of language appears to us in the material world, looking “up” to see the infinite realm of ideas infusing itself into the forms of the finite, supreme among which are words. The ideal world of cognition takes on the subtle materiality of physical sound, God’s creative word from which (according to the Bible) the rest of material existence follows. The same process may be viewed however from the opposite perspective, as the seemingly autonomous development of physical sound, its inner teleology, its directedness towards a goal. This can be heard in the scientific myth of the “big bang,” but more interestingly in the mythology of music.
Heard as music, the initial chaotic substance, the materia prima, is the undifferentiated sonority or resonance of material things, audible in the roar of water or the tone of struck metal, or the balanced cacophony of an orchestra tuning up. Whether we express the creation as matter, sound, light or utterance, that is, in terms of touch, hearing, sight or cognition, the meaning is the same. (If one were of a waggish disposition, one might expand these analogies to include smell and taste, a project which has found no takers due to the seemingly lower forms of these senses, closely related as they are to the drama of digestion).
The chaos of sonority is first divided and shaped by silence, articulated by its interruptions into rhythm. Auditory unity separates into multiplicity in the medium of time. Thus the drum, with its primordial punctuation, is historically the first of musical instruments, and in a sense the beginning of history. Similarly, light is able to disclose shape only where it is interrupted by non-light (a better term here than darkness.) The Biblical account makes this very point, equating the creation of light with the origin of time. “The first day” is the initial rhythmic articulation of existence.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God diuided the light from the darkenesse. And God called the light, Day, and the darknesse he called Night: and the euening and the morning were the first day.
Once rhythm has given articulation to sonority, the latter can be differentiated, from thuds blurry with overtones into notes, as when the monotone whistle evolves into the flute, arguably the second musical instrument to appear. Pure notes arise now as the colors of the spectrum do when white light is first interrupted by the slight opacity of a prism. Interestingly, the Biblical account follows the initial “let there be light” and its division from darkness (that is, its emergence from merely potential being) with the emergence of the colors, first the transparent, followed by the translucent and the opaque: air, water, then earth.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters: and let it diuide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament; and diuided the waters, which were vnder the firmament, from the waters, which were aboue the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament, Heauen: and the euening and the morning were the second day.
And God said, Let the waters vnder the heauen be gathered together vnto one place, and let the dry land appeare: and it was so. And God called the drie land, Earth, and the gathering together of the waters called hee, Seas: and God saw that it was good.
When rhythm is united with notes, the real is joined to the ideal: the negating limitation which is form fuses with the expansion and affirmation of sound, to create a synthesis which at the same time dissolves and preserves both form and sound in a state of non-difference: this is melody. The visual parallel is the unification of outline and color into three dimensional form. It is like the progression from drawing to painting to sculpture.
The Biblical equivalent of melody’s appearance is the creation of organisms, which fully unite light and matter, that is energy and form. The Biblical creation story now gives the creation of animate beings in ascending order of complexity. First plants, then the living shapes that populate the heavens. (The Genesis account of the creation, dating from the third or fourth century BC, is greatly influenced by Greek ideas, in this case the notion that the planets are simple though perfect animals.)
And God said, Let the Earth bring foorth grasse, the herbe yeelding seed, and the fruit tree, yeelding fruit after his kinde, whose seed is in it selfe, vpon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought foorth grasse, and herbe yeelding seed after his kinde, and the tree yeelding fruit, whose seed was in it selfe, after his kinde: and God saw that it was good. And the euening and the morning were the third day.
And God said, Let there bee lights in the firmament of the heauen, to diuide the day from the night: and let them be for signes and for seasons, and for dayes and yeeres. And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heauen, to giue light vpon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the starres also. And God set them in the firmament of the heauen, to giue light vpon the earth: And to rule ouer the day, and ouer the night, and to diuide the light from the darkenesse: and God saw that it was good. And the euening and the morning were the fourth day.
Next, given in strict order of increasing of complexity, are the fish, fowl, the other non-rational creatures, and finally man,
And God said, Let the waters bring foorth aboundantly the mouing creature that hath life, and foule that may flie aboue the earth in the open firmament of heauen. And God created great whales, and euery liuing creature that moueth, which the waters brought forth aboundantly after their kinde, and euery winged foule after his kinde: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitfull, and multiply, and fill the waters in the Seas, and let foule multiply in the earth. And the euening and the morning were the fift day.
And God said, Let the earth bring forth the liuing creature after his kinde, cattell, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kinde: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kinde, and cattell after their kinde, and euery thing that creepeth vpon the earth, after his kinde: and God saw that it was good.
And God said, Let vs make man in our Image, after our likenesse . . . .
Thus the creation was set to music: matter raised in song. From the pure notes of the elements, through the chords of animal life, to the dissonant, Schoenberg-like “music of the future” that is man. This easy equivalence of music and creation in never made in the Bible itself, due to the obviously mythological implications. These implications are however developed elsewhere, as in the Greek myth of Troy’s being built by music ( given thus in Tennyson’s Tithonus:)
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.
Similarly Camelot, as the old seer explains to Gareth in Tennyson’s Gareth and Lynette:
For truly, as thou sayest, a fairy king
And fairy queens have built the city, son;
They came from out a sacred mountain cleft
Toward the sunrise, each with harp in hand,
And built it to the music of their harps.
And, as thou sayest, it is enchanted, son,
For there is nothing in it as it seems.
The last line we may understand as the poet’s intuition of the simultaneously real and unreal (that is, ideal) nature of the created world.