Lyric Suite
Converting to Islam
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2006
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The means by which you determine "greatness" are by setting criteria by which we can objectively evaluate the degrees by which each item satisfies the given criteria. So first you have to define the word "greatness," which you are not doing because you're not a "relativist," even though your failure to define the actual word itself confines you to reiterating your own subjective opinion.
The first step in having an objective discussion is obviously to agree on a set of objective terms by which you can further qualify the discussion. You're not doing this so that you can continue bleating.
You still don't get it. Reason is limited in what it can grasp, and there is no definition or criteria that can help you overcome this limitation. But the intellect can overcome all obstacles:
Love has rosebowers amid the veil of blood; lovers have affairs
to transact with the beauty of incomparable Love.
Reason says, “The six directions are the boundary, and there
is no way out”; Love says, “There is a way, and I have many
times travelled it.”
Reason beheld a bazaar, and began trading; Love has beheld
many bazaars beyond Reason’s bazaar.
Many a hidden Mansur there is who, confiding in the soul of
Love, abandoned the pulpit and mounted the scaffold.
5 Dreg-sucking lovers possess ecstatic perceptions inwardly;
men of reason, dark of heart, entertain denials within them.
Reason says, “Set not your foot down, for in the courtyard
there is naught but thorns”; Love says, “These thorns belong to
the reason which is within you.”
Beware, be silent; pluck the thorn of being out of the heart’s
foot, that you may behold the rosebowers within you.
Shams-i Tabrızı, you are the sun within the cloud of words;
when your sun arose, all speech was obliterated
By love, of course, Rumi is talking about the intelligence. Indeed, in many traditional societies, it was the heart, and not the brain, that was thought to be the seat of the intellect.
The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity;
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.
http://www.levity.com/alchemy/blake_ma.html
Are we talking about the same Blake who derived his artistic style from medieval poetry and medieval illumination (obviously perceiving something in medieval art that others in his age couldn't)? And it is all the more amusing considering this verses are actually referring to the human "heart", precisely, the true seat of the intellect. The Priesthood of Blake is rationalism, whether of the religious or non-religious kind. For Blake, art was the "fiery chariot of contemplative thought" riding which the artist could “meet the Lord in the air.”