117. Philosophy is an ellipse. The one center, which we are closer to at present, is the rule of reason. The other is the idea of the universe, and it is here that philosophy and religion intersect.
320. Should poetry simply be divided up? Or should it remain one and indivisible? Or fluctuate between division and union? Most of the ways of conceiving a poetical world are still as primitive and childish as the old pre-Copernican ideas of astronomy. The usual classifications of poetry are mere dead pedantry designed for people with limited vision. Whatever somebody is capable of producing, or whatever happens to be in fashion, is the stationary earth at the center of all things. But in the universe of poetry nothing stands still, everything is developing and changing and moving harmoniously; and even the comets obey invariable laws of motion. But until the course of these heavenly bodies can be calculated and their return predicted, the true world system of poetry won’t have been discovered.
44. We cannot see God but we can see godlikeness everywhere —first and foremost in the heart of a thoughtful man, in the depths of a living human creation. Nature, the universe, can be felt and conceived of without mediation: but not God. Only a man among men can write divine poetry, think divine thoughts, and live religiously. No one can be the direct mediator for even his own spirit because the mediator must be purely objective, and necessarily centered on a point outside himself. One can select and appoint one’s mediator, but only a mediator who has already appointed himself as such. A mediator is one who perceives the divinity within himself and who self-destructively sacrifices himself in order to reveal, communicate, and represent to all mankind this divinity in his conduct and actions, in his words and works. If this impulse is not present, then what was perceived was not divine or not really his own. To mediate and to be mediated ire the whole higher life of man and every artist is a mediator for all other men.
150. You can neither explain nor understand the universe, but only intuit and reveal it. Only stop calling the system of empiricism the universe, and if you haven’t yet understood Spinoza, discover for the present the true religious conception of the universe in the
Talks on Religion.
In: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Peter Firchow and Rodolphe Gasche(Foreword). London, 1981.
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