Endeavoring to find the spiritual plenipotentiary

From Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

To merge his life in the common tide of other lives was harder for him than any fasting or prayer and it was his constant failure to do this to his own satisfaction which caused in his soul at least a sensation of spiritual dryness together with a growth of doubts and scruples. His soul traversed a period of desolation in which the sacraments themselves seemed to have turned into dryed up sources.

Young Stephen Dedalus

From Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man


Stephan watched the three glasses being raised from the counter as his father and his two cronies drank to the memory of their past. An abyss of fortune or of the temperament sundered him from them. His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. No life or youth stirred in him as it had stirred in them. He had known neither the pleasure of companionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial piety. Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon.

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless...?

He repeated to himself the lines of Shelley's fragment. Its alternation of sad human ineffectiveness with vast inhuman cycles of activity chilled him and he forgot his own human and ineffectual grieving.

Band-e Amir

The Credo

It was midsummer 1819, the period when Beethoven was working on the Missa at the Hafner house in Modling, in despair that every section was turning out much longer than expected, so that the deadline for its completion - it was a date in March the next year, for the installation of Archduke Rudolf as archibishop of Olmutz - could not possibly be met. And it happened that two friends, both musicians, came to visit him one afternoon, and no sooner had they entered the house than they heard shocking news. Both the master's maids had bolted that same morning after a wild scene that had occurred the night before, around one o'clock, awakening the entire house from slumber. The master had worked all evening, well into the night, on the Credo, the Credo with its fugue, never giving a thought to his evening meal, which still stood on the stove, whereupon the serving girls, having waited long in vain, at least yielded to nature and went to bed. But when, between twelve and one, the master had demanded his meal, he had found the maids asleep, the food ruined and charred, and had broken into the most violent rage, paying still less heed to the sleeping household since he could not even hear the racket he was making. "Could ye not watch with me one hour?" he had thundered over and over. But it had been five, six hours - and so the aggrieved maids had absconded by the first light of day, leaving to his own devices so uncontrollable a master, who, having had no midday meal either, had not eaten a bite since yesterday noon. Instead he had labored in his room, on the Credo, the Credo with its fugue; his disciples could hear him working behind the closed door. The deaf man sang, howled, and stomped over that Credo - the sound of it so horrifyingly moving that the blood froze in the eavesdroppers' veins. Just as they were about to depart in great trepidation, the door was flung open, and there in the doorframe stood Beethoven - what a sight! What a horrifying sight! In desheveled clothes, his facial features so distorted that they could inspire fear, his eyes listening and filled with mad abstraction, he had stared at them, looking as if he had just come from a life-and-death struggle with all the hostile spirits of counterpoint. He had first stammered something incoherent and then broken into complaints and curses about the mess in his household, about how everyone had run off, how they were letting him starve. The two attempted to calm him - one helped him to get properly dressed, the other ran to an inn to order a cheering meal... Not until three years later was the mass completed.

From Mann's Doctor Faustus

Of the 1905 revolutionaries

From The Rebel:

A life is paid for by another life, and from these two sacrifices springs the promise of a value. They believe in the equal value of human lives. Therefore they do not value any idea above human life, though they kill for the sake of ideas. To be precise, they live on the plane of their idea. They justify it, finally, by incarnating it to the point of death. We are again confronted with a concept of rebellion which, if not religious, is at least metaphysical.

By means of this, the terrorists, while simultaneously affirming the world of men, place themselves above this world, thus demonstrating for the last time in our history that real rebellion is a creator of values.

Contrarily,

Others to come will find their methods sentimental and refuse to admit that any one life is the equivalent of any other. They will then put an abstract idea above human life, even if they call it history, to which they themselves have submitted in advance and to which they will also decide, quite arbitrarily, to submit everyone else. The problem of rebellion will no longer be resolved by arithmetic, but by estimating probabilities. Confronted with the possibility that the idea may be realized in the future, human life can be everything or nothing. The greater the faith that the estimator places in this final realization, the less the value of human life.

Hegels arbitrary psychology

From The Rebel:

The arbitrary psychology set in motion by Hegel's [idea that values are only found at the end of history is] as human minds in bling combat, dimly groping on the sands, like crabs that finally come to grips in a fight to the death, and voluntarily abandoned the equally legitimate image of beams of light painfully searching for on another in the night and finally focusing together in a blaze of illumination.

If the revolution is the only positive value, it has a right to claim everything - even the denunciation and therefore the sacrifice of the friend. Henceforth, violence will be directed against one and all, in the service of an abstract idea.

The distinction between human and divine is illusory

From The Rebel:

Individuality has replaced faith, reason the Bible, politics religion and the Church, the earth heaven, work prayer, poverty hell, and man Christ." Thus there is only one hell and it is on this earth: and it is against this that the struggle must be waged. Politics is religion, and transcendent Christianity - that of the hereafter - establishes the masters of the earth by means of the slave's renunciation and creates one master more beneath the heavens. That is why atheism and the revolutionary spirit are only two aspects of the same movement of liberation. That is the answer to the question which is always being asked: why has the revolutionary movement identified itself with materialism rather than with idealism? Because to conquer God, to make Him a slave, amounts to abolishing the transcendence that kept the former masters in power and to preparing, with the ascendancy of the new tyrants, the advent of the man-king. When poverty is abolishing, when the contradictions of history are resolved, "the real god, the human god, will be the State."