And this where the history of human civilization is replete with
stories of visions of angels, of Mary, and of Christ. We may explain
this as we like, yet it proves that the simple wish, the invocation,
the self-suggestion is not enough to create a visionary image. The
demons of the Middle Ages I have seen, but not their angels, their
Marys, their Jesus, their God the Father, while yet I often longed for
it as a child and prayed for it as a man, until I was old and wise
enough to understand that I had to be glad of their non-appearance,
because the apparition of an old, bearded king as God, of a
white-robed, long-haired man as Jesus, of a winged man as an angel,
would simply have been nothing but fancied images, spectral deception
or impotent human phantasy.
Does not our simplest reason tell us that all life that is more than
human life, all higher beings, whether superman, or Christ, or God, can
have no form perceptible to man with his five senses? Do not all
endeavors of art and imagination to create something above man, remain
limited to a perfected humanity? Has not the sole conception of a
superhuman being always been the impossible one of a man with wings?
Yet we know that there is a higher being, higher life with more exalted
beauties; but clear reflection must also teach us that its form remains
imperceptible and unimaginable as long as our perceptive faculty and
our knowledge have not, in a manner at present quite inconceivable,
increased in a higher sphere, and that therefore all their awarded
shapes, though formed by Dantesque phantasy, must be erroneous.
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