rejects, repudiates the ideal Self which the male represents to her. The
supreme representative, King and Father, is murdered by the Wife and the
Daughters.
What is the reason? Hamlet goes mad in a revulsion of rage and nausea.
Yet the women-murderers only represent some ultimate judgement in his
own soul. At the bottom of his own soul Hamlet has decided that the Self
in its supremacy, Father and King, must die. It is a suicidal decision
for his involuntary soul to have arrived at. Yet it is inevitable. The
great religious, philosophic tide, which has been swelling all through
the Middle Ages, had brought him there.
The question, to be or not to be, which Hamlet puts himself, does not
mean, to live or not to live. It is not the simple human being who puts
himself the question, it is the supreme I, King and Father. To be or not
to be King, Father, in the Self supreme? And the decision is, not to be.
It is the inevitable philosophic conclusion of all the Renaissance. The
deepest impulse in man, the religious impulse, is the desire to be
immortal, or infinite, consummated. And this impulse is satisfied in
fulfilment of an idea, a steady progression. In this progression man is
satisfied, he seems to have reached his goal, this infinity, this
immortality, this eternal being, with every step nearer which he takes.
And so, according to his idea of fulfilment, man establishes the whole
order of life. If my fulfilment is the fulfilment and establishment of
the unknown divine Self which I am, then I shall proceed in the
realizing of the greatest idea of the self, the highest conception of
the I, my order of life will be kingly, imperial, aristocratic. The body
politic also will culminate in this divinity of the flesh, this body
imbued with glory, invested with divine power and might, the King, the
Emperor. In the body politic also I shall desire a king, an emperor, a
tyrant, glorious, mighty, in whom I see myself consummated and
fulfilled. This is inevitable!
But during the Middle Ages, struggling within this pagan, original
transport, the transport of the Ego, was a small dissatisfaction, a
small contrary desire. Amid the pomp of kings and popes was the Child
Jesus and the Madonna. Jesus the King gradually dwindled down. There was
Jesus the Child, helpless, at the mercy of all the world. And there was
Jesus crucified.
The old transport, the old fulfilment of the Ego, the Davidian ecstasy,
the assuming of all power and glory unto the self, the becoming infinite
through the absorption of all into the Ego, this gradually became
unsatisfactory. This was not the infinite, this was not immortality.
This was eternal death, this was damnation.
The monk rose up with his opposite ecstasy, the Christian ecstasy. There
was a death to die: the flesh, the self, must die, so that the spirit
should rise again immortal, eternal, infinite. I am dead unto myself,
but I live in the Infinite. The finite Me is no more, only the Infinite,
the Eternal, is.
At the Renaissance this great half-truth overcame the other great
half-truth. The Christian Infinite, reached by a process of abnegation,
a process of being absorbed, dissolved, diffused into the great
Not-Self, supplanted the old pagan Infinite, wherein the self like a
root threw out branches and radicles which embraced the whole universe,
became the Whole.
There is only one Infinite, the world now cried, there is the great
Christian Infinite of renunciation and consummation in the not-self. The
other, that old pride, is damnation. The sin of sins is Pride, it is the
way to total damnation. Whereas the pagans based their life on pride.
And according to this new Infinite, reached through renunciation and
dissolving into the Others, the Neighbour, man must build up his actual
form of life. With Savonarola and Martin Luther the living Church
actually transformed itself, for the Roman Church was still pagan. Henry
VIII simply said: 'There is no Church, there is only the State.' But
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