The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1268]
Knowledge is progressive. The foregone Ages were to the Present what the First Adam was to the Second — prophetic of what was to be. As the evening of the creation was before the morning, so is the night of ignorance, in every man’s mind, before the Day of Knowledge. Thus, the Egyptians were under darkness, while the children of Israel dwelt in the fulness of the light of Goshen. The Law is called the Time of Shadows, while the Time of the Gospel is called the Day of Salvation. That is the reason why the Messiah was called the Sun of Righteousness, because the Doctrine which he taught was invested with a transcendent brightness when compared with the dimly burning light of the Moon of the night of the Old Law. The night of the Jewish ceremonial was dissolved by the advent of the Sun of Righteousness. That is the reason why St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans, said, “The night is far spent, the Day is at hand.” At the time that he was writing, it was what may be called the twilight time of the truth. When he was rapt into the intellectual vision of the high noon of the glory of God, then he beheld the dawning of that Day which was to come. The dead body of the Priesthood was let down into the grave of oblivion, when the radiant, truth-illumined body of the Son of Mary came to humanize mankind.
As it was through the glorified Shekinah that the presence of Jehovah was made perfectly manifest to the Jews; so is it through the perfected body of man that his soul is made perfectly manifest. A perfect body is the only mediator of the soul. It is the body which connects the sould with the external world. It is the Shekinah of the soul.
True wisdom is the perfect revelation of the right relations subsisting between the soul of Man and the external world. This revelation is the immortality of Man speaking out of the temple of his meditorial body. A correct knowledge of the right relations subsisting between him and the external world, is the perfection of his nature. Happiness is the sequence of this antecedent knowledge. Without this perfection, there can be no happiness. This is the consummation of the truth of that sublime eulogy which was pronounced upon him by the hallowed lips of David when he said tat he was created “a little lower than the Angels, and crowned with glory and honour.”
You say that “there is no such thing as spirituality.” What will you do with the Nephesh, Roadkh Elolium, Pneuma,and Psycheof the Sacred Oracles?St. John says that “God is a spirit.”He is called the “Father of Spirits.”St. Paul says that Man is the “offspring of God.” He is the third image of his Father. Job says, “There is a spirit in Man,” &c. — “All things,” you say, “are material; yet the matter of God has all the qualities which we attribute to the spirit.” Then the matter of God is spirit. We must either attribute to spirit properties which it does not possess, or “God is a spirit” — as the substance of anything cannot be less than the qualities of which it is composed. If you mean by matter what I .mean by spirit, then your matter is my spirit, and God is material; but if you mean by matter no more than what is usually meant by it, then, my spirit is notyour matter, and “God is a spirit.”All the alchemy of your refined genius cannot transmute “unparticled matter “ into my idea of spirit. Our first idea of matter carries along with it not only a pas&e,but a reductitiousnature. As long as this is the case, we can never conceive it capable of thought.
You say that the “agitation of this unparticled matter is the thought of God, which creates.” Do you make use of the word “agitation”in the same sense that Aristotle did of the word “Actus.?”“Agitation “ is not thought, any more than motion is. Our idea of motion is too simple in its nature to be expressed in any other way than through itself-that is, motion.The same may be said of thought. Now here are two simple ideas, the difference between which