Tragic Sense Of Life

Excerpt: ...an angel, and likewise that on entire society is so called. Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael are nothing but angelical societies, which are so named from their functions." May we not perhaps live and love-that is, suffer and pity-in this all-enveloping Supreme Person-we, all the persons who suffer and pity and all the beings that strive to achieve personality, to acquire consciousness of their suffering and their limitation? And are we not, perhaps, ideas of this total Grand Consciousness, which by thinking of us as existing confers existence upon us? Does not our existence consist in being perceived and felt by God? And, further on, this same visionary tells us, under the form of images, that each angel, each society of angels, and the whole of heaven comprehensively surveyed, appear in human form, and in virtue of this human form the Lord rules them as one man. "God does not think, He creates; He does not exist, He is eternal," wrote Kierkegaard (Afslutende uvidens-kabelige Efterskrift); but perhaps it is more exact to say with Mazzini, the mystic of the Italian city, that "God is great because His thought is action" (Ai giovani d'ltalia), because with Him to think is to create, and He gives existence to that which exists in His thought by the mere fact of thinking it, and the impossible is the un thinkable by God. Is it not written in the Scriptures that God creates with His word-that is to say, with His thought-and that by this, by His Word, He made everything that exists? And what God has once made does He ever forget? May it not be that all the thoughts that have ever passed through the Supreme Consciousness still subsist therein? In Him, who is eternal, is not all existence eternalized? Our longing to save consciousness, to give personal and human finality to the Universe and to existence, is such that even in the midst of a supreme, an agonizing and lacerating sacrifice, we should still...