by Unknown
The opposite paths lead elsewhere: for instance, the age of Romanticism in Western Europe gave a major voice to emotions during the first three or four decades of the 19th century. They were the principal motivation of creative inspiration, not only in literature, lyrical poetry, painting or sculpture, but also in musical composition, philosophical thinking and metaphysics. Moreover, they motivated the course of political life, the convictions based on merit, the trends of ideas, the start of social reforms, enthusiasm, high ideals, the morals and in social life, in general, in almost every sphere of cultural activity. Spontaneity and sentiment drove artistic creators and poets to produce works of unparalleled aesthetic inspiration, with the element of the marvellous and the mythical and they also made them disapprove and shake off the old “rules of technique”. Vis-à-vis the established logical forms, in every field of creation, affect prevailed throughout those times. The surrounding material reality was being put aside and ignored, yielding to emotion and imagination. The perception of life and the world beyond reason prevailed everywhere, on every sphere of the known and in every field of achievement.
Dienach also makes the case of other spiritual courses and directions. For instance, Western man has shown complete disdain for the profound mysticism of the East. Based on the latter, the Hindus, for example, had developed their own peculiar primeval spiritual civilisation up until the 19th century. Within a life which was materially frugal and a strictly agricultural economy, disapproving of every attempt for social climbing and ignoring all the achievements of science and technology, these deeply philosophical religious tribes had focused their attention on Brahma and his teachings. At the same time, they strove to embrace and realise the fusion of man’s individuality with the spirit of everything, the identification of the human soul with the One and everything.
He also says that the intensive and somehow one-sided cultivation of human psychodynamics, once done extensively and for a considerable amount of time, could form an entire civilisation of another form of its own individual mark. This cultivation can be done by means of telepathy, reading and transferring thoughts, foreknowledge and foretelling of future events, perception beyond senses, invocation of spirits, and so on, within a spiritual ambience that would be very different from ours, within a beatified ambience of social co-existence. One would there observe a noticeable fall in the positive sciences and rationality as well as in pragmatic judgement and materialistic life in general along with faith in data perceived by the five senses, in the experience of material and real life around us.
Either way, Dienach disapproves of any one-sidedness in the course of civilisation. He condemns, that is, any exaggeration in any exclusive and one-sided direction, which would result in the weakening of certain fields of human abilities. The truly high purposes of culture, the teleological opinions which hold most merit, are connected to a parallel, balanced, harmonious and almost equilateral cultivation and development of the best human abilities and the worthiest tendencies, according to this version. His perspective embraces, as much as possible, the prevalence of higher ideals, the experience of unparalleled spiritual and emotional treasures encompassed within the real and deeper spirit of Christianity and the realisation of humanism and freedom in social life, among the peoples of the world. In fact, Dienach considers these two last ideals, humanism and freedom, the highest one could find in the system of moral values formed within our Western civilisation by classical education, humanism and Christian tradition with their marvellous union, their incomparable marriage.
During the four years of the German Occupation in Greece—all Dienach’s manuscripts were still available up until the events of December 1944 and the days when I found shelter in a friend’s home, in Thisseos Street, on Christmas Eve 1944—four people had read the original two “Diaries” and the Diary with the Chronicles From The Future: they were the respectable Greek Macedonian friend and colleague, highly educated, whose favourite occupation was, as I can recall from then, his involvement in the Masonic and theosophical movement—he ranked high in Freemasonry; a theology professor from the Greek island of Tinos, who was quite renowned in his time; and two German friends of the latter, father and son. The father was a history professor of liberal ideas while the son was a young reserve officer of the Occupation army with great aversion towards the Hitlerites, which he did not hesitate to share with me.
Each one of them had kept Dienach’s actual manuscripts for several weeks and months and had read them to the end. However, their impressions of the manuscripts varied.
The German history professor told me, upon returning the manuscripts, that Dienach was not a simple professor of mediocre education, as I thought at the time. He was, he says, a great personality of the Western European spirit, a true spiritual leader of the white race, a prophet inspired by God, inspired by the love and thirst to contribute to the survival of the Western civilisation. He also added that Dienach foretells the Yellow Peril and the terrible wars of the 23rd century and calls upon Europeans to be infused with the need of a single national consciousness and a pan-European political community. In the case of Dienach, the German historian told me, the time succession between theorists and pragmatists is repeated as it had occurred in both great revolutions: the French one of 1789 and the Russian one of 1917. Twentieth century Dienach stands, he says, before the great fighters of the following centuries, before the European political leaders and the warlords of the 23rd century as their ideological and theoretical forerunner. In other words, he is what Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, the Encyclopaedists and other 18th-century thinkers more or less were before the orators of constituent national assemblies and the military leaders of the bourgeoisie during the last ten years of the 18th century in France.
“You Greeks have the term ‘teacher of the nation’,” he said. “So, Dienach was a true teacher of the nation, but with a different meaning from yours, a much broader one: a meaning regarding the ethnological, territorial and mostly cultural scope of the Western European spirit.”
However, I remember the German professor being on a different train of thought on another day:
“In Dienach’s texts one can distinguish two opposing ideological tendencies. On the one hand, the voice of the 19th century onwards, the centuries of a materialistic view of the world and life, the centuries of technocracy. On the other hand, there is the voice of the Nojere as Dienach would call it (3382 AD). This former’s motto is that the proper pragmatic viewing of life, the world and scientific thinking succeeded the immature time period of naive faith. Our 19th century,” he says, “introduced us to science and put an end to the ‘theological prejudices’ of past times. Research methods in natural sciences led us to the knowledge of things as they truly are. It also showed the true nature of man (a biochemical laboratory of marvellous hereditary mental abilities) and the world (the natural universe with its material elements, with matter-energy and the powers they encompass as well as the laws of celestial mechanics). It also became evident that men, prompted by the fear of death and the bitter realisation of their ephemeral biological fate, created religions, God, the Beyond, the distinction between bad and good as well as life after death as a justification of virtue.
The Nojere (986 of the ‘new chronology’) proves these things to be faulty. They are, he says, on a merely human scale. They are only what the finite cognitive potential of human-recipients has the ability to perceive. It is only what is perceived by this particular biological species on this grain of sand of the divine strand, which encompasses countless inhabited spheres. The conviction of this ‘new age’ is that the ontological reality, as objectively existing, is entirely different. It has such a hyper-cosmic and superb beauty and such a cognitively impenetrable and ‘unlikely’ grandeur that it finds something very different before it—another ‘side’ of it; only a simpler one. It is the natural universe and life in its entirety along with whatever falls under our cognitive abilities: the senses, the intellect, rationality etc. Bef
ore it, all that was said by the greatest religions in their dogmas, the most ‘undoubtable’ truths in natural sciences—via the method of ‘scientific’ research—and the highest cosmic-theoretical conceptions as well as the most valued expressions in metaphysical faith all seem naive and childish. This reality is ‘something inconceivably big’.”
The German historian’s son was of a different opinion:
“Dienach’s main idea was to continue the love story with his dead beloved,” he told me. “This intense thirst of his soul was what made him write the Diary. This secret longing for such a possibility, his deeply human burning heartache breathed into him the desire to narrate all that. Using his pen, he gave his constrained human biological fate the time extension that real life would deny. All this happened in order to write the continuation of the ongoing story of a great love, which was prematurely terminated, and to pursue it. He did not actually live his writings. It is all ‘made up by himself’, artificial and imaginary. Dienach is an ‘incurable romantic’, ‘a poet with quite a few delusions’ and in fact ‘a psychologically ailing individual who lives inside ‘his own’ reality.”
The young anti-Hitler reserve officer of the German Occupation army later asked me to swear that those manuscripts were authentic and that Dienach had actually existed. I did so with pleasure, since I knew it well enough to be true. I tried to figure out his character: the content of the Diary had excited him, literally overwhelmed him. Anyone could speak with him freely. He was an honest humanist and not that ideologically distant from us Greeks.
“He doesn’t exist anymore,” he told me later on in the conversation, “but how wonderful it is that his mode of thinking has survived through these manuscripts…”
He confessed to me that many sections of the Diary had brought tears to his eyes.
“Are you sure that only his mother was Austrian?” he later asked me. “My personal opinion is that his father was also Austrian and that he had participated in World War I. He had nothing to do with Zurich and it will be pointless for you to search there when Europe is at peace. He was Austrian and a Catholic and he had experienced the terror of the 1914 War.”
At first, he showed me in the “First Notebook” the words written about Father Jacob that he “had gone out for a walk with three Protestant priests on August 14, 1922”. Then he showed me another phrase of the Diary Pages at the end of the 12th—VII: “How happy would I be had I been relieved of every feeling of disgust and shame, away from the smell of mustard gas,” he says where I have now put the title-header on the pages “The Valley of the Roses” (original title of the First Edition) in my translation.
“He was a Catholic and his father was German or Austrian,” my interlocutor continued. He had a guilt complex, which could not be justified in his individual case. It is highly likely he had participated in the war. He was hypersensitive. He suffered from “the complex of his people’s guilt” of the imperial era. He literally writes anti-war literature in many parts of his texts. He was not Swiss. He had kept his real self secret from you and most probably his real name. He did this while trying to “find students” because he knew that half the Athenians of that time—in 1922 and 1923—were sympathisers of the Entente Powers.”
The university professor from the Greek island of Tinos and an outstanding man of intellect of those times found the Diary’s central meaning elsewhere.
“What is most essential in Dienach’s manuscripts,” he said, “is his perspective that an incredibly great and beautiful solution to the great metaphysical problems shall be found after a long, long time. These problems are the problems of the world, God, the origins, the course and the end purposes of men, the beginning and the end of beings. This shall be an incredible interpretation to the deep mystery of life, a brilliant answer to all those great questions that have taunted man as a thinker in the most noble and valued of individual and group cases. It would be so great an explanation that the human mind ‘cannot perceive its grandeur and exquisite beauty for the time being’. He believes that there will be a time when what happened with the field of celestial mechanics and the natural universe in general at the beginning of the 20th century shall also happen in the field of a more universal worldview. In other words, true, ontological reality will prove to transcend to an incredible degree the highest dreams of the human spirit and the boldest expectations of the human heart. Dienach envisions that what people will once know about these issues shall be superior in terms of grandeur and beauty to what we know today, even more superior than the scientific knowledge of the beginnings of the 20th century of the issues of the natural universe in comparison with the times before Eudoxus, Aristoteles, Aristarchus, Hipparchus and Archimedes.”
I remember him telling me on another day:
“Dienach reminds me of William James (William James, an American thinker, 1842-1910), Renan, Huxley and other thinkers of the central and Western Europe of the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, who feared that Christianity no longer satisfies—namely in its dogmatism—an increasing number of the modern educated people of the Western world. Christian doctrines have more and more difficulty, the aforementioned thinkers say, staying in touch with what is already known of existence, as this is revealed to us by the course of the world and the development of knowledge during these last two centuries. From then on, their roads part. These crypto-materialistic thinkers have the tendency to replace religion with an infinite admiration towards science and even towards evolutionary humanism. They also hold that religions that place themselves ‘above worldly matters’ speak of things that do not exist and that it is high time the West adopted a religion taking the course and direction towards the fullest possible development of man’s spiritual and moral abilities, towards the harmonious and fullest realisation of the highest and most beautiful predispositions and worthy tendencies. Dienach is of the opposite mind. He does not only believe that there are realities that are characterised as ‘metaphysical’ and ‘otherworldly’ by man. He also believes that what ‘objectively exists’ is of a grandeur and beauty which is inconceivable by the human-receivers. It also stands higher and escapes (‘exceeds’) all that was said so far by the greatest religions, the most valued philosophical teachings, the most ambitious cosmic-theoretical conceptions and, generally, the highest spiritual preachings on this planet throughout the history of the human spirit. Dienach envisions a great new spiritual preaching, Volkic Knowledge as he calls it. The latter shall be a spiritual teaching of unprecedented level, excellent and wondrous, which tends to replace the already known accepted dogmas of Christianity and its theological basis in the ontological field with a broader, higher and more universal view of the world, life and every sphere of existence. This shall be done without offending the established values of the Christian tradition and its incomparable moral teachings in the slightest.”
My educated Greek Macedonian theosophist and respectable friend was of another, totally different, opinion.
“I am totally convinced,” he told me upon returning the manuscripts to me “that the Diary has not been written by Dienach in Athens in 1923-1924. It has been written in northern Italy and other European regions in 3905 and 3906 by Andreas Northam. He was its real author. Dienach’s personality and life are a simple ‘strong memory of pre-existence’, which occupied for many months, almost a year, Andreas Northam’s thoughts, emotional world and generally his spirit and his whole thinking. Dienach is ‘a simple copyist from memory’. He did nothing but write ‘for a second time’ in 1923-1924 what was written by Andreas Northam ‘for the first time” in 3905 and the following year. The temporal antinomy is clearly set on the human scale, so this whole story seems incredible from the start. One may say that I am being irrational. However, this antinomy in the flow of time only exists for human standards, for human perception potential, only for human standards, which can only understand the meaning of aligned time with yesterday, today and tomorrow. Extremely rare are the cases when the hu
man spirit overcomes the obstacles, transcends human standards and acquires means of perception beyond the senses, telepathy, clairvoyance and a great number of things beyond the ‘established’ kinds of psychic potential. Time may very well actually be—in its objective nature—different from our own human perceptions thereof, which are subjective and anthropomorphic.”
The Greek Macedonian theosophist had obviously worded the above thoughts in impeccable purist Greek (since he was infused with this linguistic tradition). I, however, transcribe them here in the vernacular, since it is the variant of this entire pre-introductory and critical note. He was assisted in reading the manuscripts by a young German-speaking reader, a relative or a friend of his—a student of the pedagogical academy or an archaeologist if I remember correctly. He was the only one among the four not to have mastered Dienach’s mother tongue. He had not read the entire manuscript, he said. Nevertheless, he talked to me about them. He believed that only the “First Diary” and the “Second Diary” were actually written by Dienach himself. He attributes the Diary with the Chronicles From the Future to Northam. Regarding Northam, he also believed that at the age of twenty-eight he was meant to be—upon some very serious injury, which had temporarily led to his clinical death—Paul Dienach’s reincarnation, which is, he says, “a totally rare case of reincarnation since it occurred in a European region of our own sphere.”
I remember that in one of our meetings this theosophist and Mason and respectable friend formulated the thought that all those who had happened to meet Dienach in person and then read his Diary would have made. The thought that the author of these texts bore in mind the same facts, the same things, the same incidents, the same “material” in a word, on which the future historians shall work after a very long time. The difference is that the latter shall give this material the form of historical research and historiography and their methodology shall be totally different. Here, Dienach handles that same material as a traveller-narrator and assigns it the external form of “travel fiction” of a somewhat literary nature in the wording of the text and with that embellishment which was so familiar to his mentality and did not fit with the usual style of our times. I remember my respectable friend added that the most interesting element underlying these texts is the retrograde perspective of times not too far from us now (the 21st and the 22nd centuries) that can be adopted by someone recording historical impressions in those very distant years in the future.