O Athens! Diotima cried; at times I have mourned when I gazed out and the phantom of the Olympieion rose before me out of the blue twilight.
How far across is it? I asked.
A day’s journey, perhaps, Diotima replied.
A day’s journey, I cried, and I have not yet been there? We must go across together at once.
Fine then! cried Diotima; tomorrow we will have a serene sea, and all still stands now in its greenness and ripeness.
One needs the eternal sun and the life of the immortal earth for such a pilgrimage.
Tomorrow then! I said, and our friends agreed.
We sailed early, amidst the song of the rooster, out of the road-stead. We and the world shone in fresh clarity. Golden, serene youth was in our hearts. The life in us was like the life of a new-born ocean island on which the first spring begins.
Under Diotima’s influence, more equilibrium had long since entered my soul; today I felt it three times as purely, and the scattered, swarming powers were all gathered in one golden mean.
We spoke of the excellence of the ancient Athenian people, whence it came, in what it consisted.
Someone said the climate brought it about; another: art and philosophy; the third: religion and form of government.
Athenian art and religion and philosophy and form of government, I said, are blossoms and fruits of the tree, not soil and root. You take the effects for the cause.
But he who tells me that the climate shaped all this ought to consider that we, too, still live in it.
More undisturbed in every regard, freer from powerful influence than any other people of the earth, thus the Athenian people grew up. No conqueror weakens them, no military success intoxicates them, no foreign form of worship benumbs them, no rash wisdom drives them to unseasonable ripeness. Left to itself like the nascent diamond, thus is their childhood. One hears nearly nothing from them until the times of Pisistratus and Hipparchus. They took only a small part in the Trojan war, which, as in a hothouse, heated and invigorated most of the Greek peoples too early. – No extraordinary destiny engenders men. Great and colossal are the sons of such a mother, but beautiful beings or, what is the same thing, men, that they never become, or not until late, when the contrasts battle each other too fiercely not to make peace in the end.
In exuberant strength, Lacedaemon hastens ahead of the Athenians, and would have scattered and dissolved itself even earlier for this precise reason had not Lycurgus come and held its overweening nature together with his discipline. From then on, everything in the Spartan was shaped, all excellence achieved and purchased through diligence and self-conscious striving, and as much as one can speak in a certain sense of the simplicity of the Spartan, nonetheless the actual simplicity of the child was, as if by nature, not at all to be found among them. The Lacedaemonians breached too early the order of instinct, they degenerated too early, and thus discipline also had to begin for them too early; for every discipline and art begins too early when the nature of man has not yet ripened. Perfected nature must live in the human child before he enters school, so that the image of childhood may show him the way back from school to perfect nature.
The Spartans remained eternally a fragment; for he who was not once a perfect child can hardly become a perfect man.
Certainly, heaven and earth, too, did their part for the Athenians, as for all Greeks, dispensed neither poverty nor abundance to them. The rays of heaven did not fall on them like a rain of fire. The earth did not coddle and intoxicate them with caresses and excessively kind gifts as the foolish mother does here and there.
In addition to this came the wondrously great deed of Theseus, the voluntary limitation of his own royal power.
O! such a seed cast into the hearts of the people must engender an ocean of golden ears, and it still visibly thrives and proliferates even late among the Athenians.
So once more! that the Athenians grew up so free from powerful influence of all kinds, with such a moderate diet, this made them so excellent, and this alone could!
Leave man undisturbed from the cradle on! do not drive him out of the tightly closed bud of his being, out of the small hut of his childhood! do not do too little, and thereby he shall not dispense with you and thus distinguish you from himself; do not do too much, and thereby he shall not feel your or his power and thus distinguish you from himself; in short, do not let man know until late that there are men, that there is anything else outside of him, for only thus shall he become a man. But man is a god as soon as he is a man. And when he is a god, he is beautiful.
Strange! cried one of our friends.
You have never before spoken so deeply from my soul, cried Diotima.
I have learned it from you, I replied.
Thus was the Athenian a man, I went on, thus he had to become a man. He came beautiful from the hands of nature, beautiful in body and soul, as one is wont to say.
The first child of human, of divine beauty is art. In art, divine man rejuvenates and repeats himself. He wants to feel himself, therefore he sets his beauty over against himself. Thus man gave himself his gods. For in the beginning man and his gods were one, when, unknown to itself, eternal beauty was. – I speak mysteries, but they are. –
The first child of divine beauty is art. Thus it was among the Athenians.
Beauty’s second daughter is religion. Religion is love of beauty. The wise man loves beauty itself, the infinite, the all-embracing; the people loves beauty’s children, the gods, who appear to it in manifold forms. Thus it was, too, among the Athenians. And without such love of beauty, without such religion, every state is a dried-up skeleton without life and spirit, and all thought and deed a tree without a top, a column from which the crown has been toppled.
But that this was truly the case among the Greeks and particularly the Athenians, that their art and their religion are the true children of eternal beauty – perfect human nature – and could only emerge from perfect human nature, is clearly visible if one will only see with impartial eyes the objects of their holy art and the religion with which they loved and honored those objects.
There are shortcomings and missteps everywhere, and so, too, here. But it is certain that one nonetheless mostly finds mature man in the objects of their art. There is not the pettiness nor the monstrousness of the Egyptians and Goths; there is human mind and human figure. They run less than others to the extremes of the supersensual and the sensual. Their gods remain in the beautiful mean of mankind more than others.
And as the object of their art, so, too, love. Not too servile and not too familiar! –
From the Athenians’ beauty of spirit also ensued the necessary sense of freedom.
The Egyptian bears without pain the despotism of arbitrary power, the son of the North bears without aversion the despotism of the law, the injustice in the legal code; for, from the womb on, the Egyptian has the impulse to pay tribute and idolize; in the North, one believes too little in the pure, free life of nature not to cling with superstition to legality.
The Athenian cannot bear arbitrary power, because his divine nature will not be disturbed, he cannot bear legality everywhere, because he does not need it everywhere, Draco is no use to him. He will be treated tenderly, and he is right in that.
Good! someone interrupted me, that I grasp, but how this poetic, religious people should also be a philosophical people, that I do not see.
Without poetry, I said, they would in fact never have been a philosophical people!
What does philosophy, he replied, what does the cold sublimity of this knowledge have to do with poetry?
Poetry, I said, sure of my subject, is the beginning and the end of this knowledge. Like Minerva from Jupiter’s head, philosophy springs from the poetry of an infinite, divine Being. And thus, in philosophy, too, the irreconcilable ultimately converges again in the mysterious wellspring of poetry.
This is a paradoxical man, cried Diotima, yet I sense his meaning. But you stray from the subject. We spe
ak of Athens.
The man, I resumed, who has not at least once in his life felt full, pure beauty in himself when the powers of his being played into one another like the colors in a rainbow, who has never experienced how, only in hours of enthusiasm, all is in the most intimate accord, this man will not even be a philosophical skeptic, his spirit is not even made for tearing down, let alone building up. For, believe me, the skeptic finds contradiction and flaw in all that is thought only because he knows the harmony of flawless beauty, which is never thought. He disdains the dry bread that well-meaning human reason offers him only because he feasts in secret at the table of the gods.
Enthusiast! cried Diotima, that is why you, too, were a skeptic. But the Athenians!
I come to them, I said. The great word of Heraclitus, εν διαφερον εαυτ (the one differentiated in itself), this only a Greek could find, for it is the essence of beauty, and before this was found, there was no philosophy.
Now one could designate; the whole was there. The flower had ripened; one could now dissect.
The moment of beauty had now been made known among men, was there in life and spirit; the infinitely united was.
One could take it apart, divide it up it in thought, could think the divided together anew, could thus know more and more the essence of the highest and best and set what one knew into law in the spirit’s manifold domains.
Do you see now why the Athenians in particular had to be a philosophical people?
The Egyptian could not be such. He who does not live equally in love with and loved by heaven and earth, he who does not live at one in this sense with the element in which he stirs, is by nature also not so at one within himself as a Greek, and experiences eternal beauty at least not so easily as a Greek.
Like a lofty despot, the oriental climate casts its dwellers to the ground with its power and radiance, and, before man has learned to walk, he must kneel, before he has learned to speak, he must pray; before his heart has attained equilibrium, it must bow, and before the spirit is strong enough to bear flowers and fruits, fate and nature drain all strength out of it with blazing heat. The Egyptian is devoted before he is a whole, and thus he knows nothing of the whole, nothing of beauty, and the highest that he names is a veiled power, a dreadful enigma; the mute, dark Isis is his first and last, an empty infinity, and out of that nothing rational has ever come. Even from the most sublime nothing, nothing is born.
The North, on the other hand, drives its pupils too early into themselves, and if the spirit of the fiery Egyptian, too eager to journey, hastens out into the world, in the North the spirit prepares to return into itself before it is even ready to journey.
In the North, a man must already be sensible even before a mature feeling is in him, he imputes guilt to himself for everything even before ingenuousness has reached its beautiful end; he must become rational, become self-conscious spirit before he is a man, must become a shrewd man before he is a child; he does not allow the unity of the whole man, beauty, to thrive and ripen in him before he cultivates and develops himself. Mere intellect, mere reason, are always the kings of the North.
But from mere intellect has come nothing intelligent, from mere reason nothing rational.
Intellect without beauty of spirit is like a subservient journeyman who constructs the fence out of coarse wood as sketched out for him, and nails the carpentered posts together for the garden that the master shall cultivate. The whole business of the intellect is makeshift. It protects us from senselessness, from injustice, by establishing order; but to be safe from senselessness and injustice is not the highest level of human excellence.
Reason without beauty of spirit and heart is like an overseer whom the lord of the house has set over the serfs; he knows as little as the serfs what shall come of all the endless work, and only cries: Get moving, and is almost loath to see it happen, for in the end he would have nothing more to oversee, and his role would be played.
From mere intellect comes no philosophy, for philosophy is more than the limited knowledge of what exists.
From mere reason comes no philosophy, for philosophy is more than the blind demand for an interminable progress in the unification and differentiation of a particular material.
But when the divine εν διαφερον εαυτ, striving reason’s ideal of beauty, shines forth, then it does not demand blindly, and knows why and wherefore it demands.
When the sun of the beautiful shines upon the intellect at its business as a May day shines into the artist’s workshop, then it does not rush out and abandon its makeshift work, yet it thinks fondly of the festive day when it will wander in the rejuvenating spring light.
This was as far as I had come when we landed on the coast of Attica.
Ancient Athens now lay too much in our minds for us to speak with much order, and I marveled now myself at the nature of my utterances. How, I cried, did I end up on the dry mountain summit on which you saw me?
It is always thus, replied Diotima, when we feel quite well. Exuberant strength seeks work. Young lambs butt heads when they are sated with the mother’s milk.
We now climbed up Lycabettus, and at times, despite the haste, we stopped in thoughts and wondrous expectations.
It is beautiful that it is so hard for man to be convinced of the death of what he loves, and probably no one has ever gone to his friend’s grave without the faint hope of truly encountering the friend there. Like the figure of a mother who returns from the realm of the dead, the beautiful phantom of ancient Athens seized me.
O Parthenon! I cried, pride of the world! at your feet lies the kingdom of Neptune like a conquered lion, and the other temples gather around you like children, and the eloquent Agora and the Grove of Academe –
Can you thus transport yourself into ancient times? Diotima asked.
Do not remind me of the times! I replied; it was a divine life and man was then the center of nature. The spring, when it bloomed around Athens, was like a humble flower on the virgin’s bosom; the sun rose red with shame over the glories of the earth.
The marble cliffs of Hymettus and Pentelicus sprang forth from their slumbering cradle like children from the mother’s lap and attained form and life under the tender hands of the Athenians.
Nature dispensed honey and the most beautiful violets and myrtles and olives.
Nature was a priestess and man her god, and all life in her and every form and every tone from her but one enthusiastic echo of the glorious being to whom she belonged.
Him she celebrated, only to him did she sacrifice.
He was also worthy of it, he might sit lovingly in the holy workshop and embrace the knees of the divine image that he had made, or, lying among hearkening students on the promontory on Sunium’s green peak, while away the time with high thoughts, or he might run in the stadium, or, like the storm god, send rain and sunshine and lightning and golden clouds from the orator’s platform –
O look! Diotima suddenly called to me.
I looked, and might have expired before the all-powerful sight. Like an immense shipwreck when the hurricanes have fallen silent and the sailors have fled and the corpse of the shattered fleet lies unrecognizable on the sandbank, thus lay Athens before us, and the abandoned pillars stood before us like the naked trunks of a forest that had still been green in the evening and in the night had gone up in flames.
Here, said Diotima, one learns to be at peace with his own destiny, be it good or bad.
Here one learns to be at peace with everything, I continued. Had the reapers who mowed this field of grain enriched their barns with its stalks, nothing would have been lost, and I would content myself with standing here as a gleaner; but then, who won?
All Europe, replied one of our friends.
O yes! I cried, they have dragged away the pillars and statues and sold them to one another, have prized the noble figures at no small worth due to their rarity, as one prizes parrots and monkeys.
Do not say that! replied the same m
an; and if the spirit of all that is beautiful is truly lacking for them, then it would be because it could not be carried away and not purchased.
Yes indeed! I cried. This spirit had also perished even before the destroyers descended upon Attica. Not until the houses and temples are deserted do the wild beasts venture into the gates and streets.
For him who has that spirit, said Diotima consolingly, Athens still stands like a blooming fruit tree. The artist easily completes the torso for himself.
The next day we went out early, saw the ruins of the Parthenon, the site of the ancient Theater of Bacchus, the Temple of Theseus, the sixteen columns that still remain standing of the divine Olympieion; but I was most moved by the ancient gate through which one once came out of the ancient city into the new, where surely a thousand beautiful people once greeted one another in a single day. Now one comes neither into the ancient nor into the new city through this gate, and it stands there mute and desolate like a dried-up fountain from whose pipes clear, fresh water once sprang with friendly splashes.
O! I said, while we walked about, it is a marvelous game that destiny plays here, toppling the temples and giving the shattered stones to the children to throw about, making mutilated gods into benches before peasant huts and tombs into places of rest for grazing bulls, and such prodigality is more regal than the wantonness of Cleopatra when she drank the melted pearl; but it is a shame nonetheless for all the greatness and beauty!
Dear Hyperion! Diotima cried, it is time that you left; you are pale and your eyes are weary, and you seek in vain to help yourself with thoughts. Come out! into the green! among the colors of life! That will do you good.
We went out into the nearby gardens.
On the way, the others had fallen into conversation with two British scholars who reaped their harvest among the antiquities in Athens, and they were not to be moved from the spot. I left them gladly.
My whole being roused itself when I once again found myself alone with Diotima; she had endured a glorious battle with the holy chaos of Athens. As the lyre of the heavenly Muse over the discordant elements, so Diotima’s quiet thoughts ruled over the ruins. As the moon from tender clouds, so her spirit rose up from beautiful sorrow; the heavenly maiden stood there in her melancholy like the flower that gives off its loveliest fragrance at night.
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