This is an aphorism of mine I wanted to make the subject of a thread.
Strange melodies.-- The delight in viciousness peculiar to the ancient Greeks, the travails of the religious conscience, virtue as arete– these are all flowers that flourished only in the soil of a particular time and, deprived of this soil, quickly perished. Let us examine the growth of one of these flowers. The disparate passions of Eros, divine transcendence, and mystical union, accumulated as they were throughout the culture of Dante in the diverse strains of the philosophers, poets, and theologians to whom he had access, required him to intervene and, under the providence of his own poetic vision, to unite them. Only when these sensations had been joined and, passed down in this new combination, did they finally succeed in entering into the true baptism of culture and, having been adopted by the social conscience of a particular era in time, eventually marked the birth of a new passion altogether. We have come to call this passion “romantic” love, the idea of union with a twin soul. The former flowers have wholly perished from the earth; is it not impossible to conceive that this one, too, shall do the same? Perhaps that form of education which could revive such passions has not yet been invented. One would have to seek for the point in time were some group of disparate passions were united, as in the case of Dante, and then prepare that culture in which they had again been born asunder for the reception of this “melody” of sensations which would seem completely new and so strange to it. Given the fact that, in the past, this reception was altogther a product of nature, the reaction of a culture to the dawn of a melody whose time had come, a melody which had been tuned for their ears alone by the rhythms of their own artistic and philosophic traditions, perhaps no science yet exists which could indicate to us the steps which would have to be taken to artifically induce it and thus revitalize those passions which have been lost to us, to make comprehensible again those melodies whose aesthetic criteria have been so thoroughly forgotten. What form would this science assume? It would be nothing less than a history of the social conscience, informed by the study of the origination and development of social feelings, those listed here only serving as a few examples. In this science theology, the arts, literature, politics, philosophy-- all of these would at last find their commonality.