{"id":90100,"date":"2017-04-10T12:00:58","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T11:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=90100"},"modified":"2017-04-07T12:58:36","modified_gmt":"2017-04-07T11:58:36","slug":"george-william-russell-10-apr-1867-17-jul-1935-to-see-things-in-the-germ-this-i-call-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/04\/george-william-russell-10-apr-1867-17-jul-1935-to-see-things-in-the-germ-this-i-call-intelligence\/","title":{"rendered":"George William Russell (10 Apr 1867 \u2013 17 Jul 1935): To See Things in the Germ, This I Call Intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cAre there not such spirits among us ready to join in the noblest of all adventures\u2014 the building up of a civilization \u2014so that the human might reflect the divine order?\u00a0 In the divine order there is both freedom and solidarity. It is the virtue of the soul to be free and its nature to love; and when it is free and acts by its own will, it is most united with all other life.\u201d<\/em>
\n— George William Russell, The Song of the Greater Life<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

(Wikipedia)<\/p><\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/em>George W. Russell was an Irish poet, painter, mystic, and reformer of agriculture in the years 1900 to the mid-1930s. He wrote under the initials A.E. and was so well known as A.E. that his friends called him \u201cA.E.\u201d and not \u201cGeorge\u201d.\u00a0 He was a close friend and co-worker with William Butler Yeats who was a better poet and whose poems are more read today.\u00a0 Both A.E. and Yeats were part of the Irish or Celtic revival which worked for a cultural renewal as part of the effort to get political independence from England.<\/p>\n

Ireland lived under a subtle form of colonialism rather than the more obvious Empire in Africa or India where domination was made more obvious by the distance from the center of power and the racial differences.\u00a0 The Irish were white, Christian, and partially anglicized culturally.\u00a0 English and Scots had moved to Ireland and by the end of the 19th<\/sup> century became the landed gentry.\u00a0 Thus Russell and Yeats felt that there had to be a renewal of Irish culture upon which a state could be built. Yet for A.E. political independence was only a first step to building a country of character and intellect \u201ca civilization worthy of our hopes and our ages of struggle and sacrifice\u201d.\u00a0 He lamented that \u201cFor all our passionate discussions over self-government we have had little speculation over our own character or the nature of the civilization we wished to create for ourselves\u2026The nation was not conceived of as a democracy freely discussing its laws, but as a secret society with political chiefs meeting in the dark and issuing orders.\u201d<\/p>\n

For A.E. the truly modern are those engaged in meditation and spiritual disciplines, a way of reaching \u201cthe world of the spirit where all hearts and minds are one.\u201d Unless the Celtic peoples create a new civilization, they will disappear and be replaced by a more vigorous race. An Irish identity must be open and unafraid of assimilating the best that other traditions have to offer.\u00a0 As A.E. <\/em>wrote \u201cTo see, we must be exalted.\u00a0 When our lamp is lit, we find the house our being has many chambers\u2026and windows which open into eternity.\u201d \u00a0As he said of Ireland, “a land where lived a perfectly impossible people with whom anything was possible.”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Portrait of George William Russel. National Gallery of Ireland<\/p><\/div>\n

When the Irish Free State was created in 1919, the island was partitioned, Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom.\u00a0 Tensions between the Free State government and the Republicans who rejected the partition led to a civil war.\u00a0 Even after the civil war\u2019s end in 1923, Republican resistance and general lawlessness continued throughout the 1920s.\u00a0 During its first decade the Free State government faced a serious crisis of legitimacy.\u00a0 It had to assert the new state\u2019s political and cultural integrity in the face of partition and the lack of social change.\u00a0 In its economic structures, legal system, post-colonial Ireland looked much like colonial Ireland.\u00a0 Therefore the government stressed an \u201cIrish culture\u201d of the most repressive and narrow form.\u00a0 The Roman Catholic Church had a unique and virtually unquestioned monopoly on education in Ireland.\u00a0 Popular Irish nationalism had been structured around the antithesis between Ireland and England, and this continued after independence when it was said that all \u201cimmorality\u201d \u2014 obscene literature, wild dances and immodest fashions \u2014 came from England.\u00a0 After 1923, the Catholic hierarchy fulminated most consistently and strongly\u00a0 against sexual immorality, not merely as wrong, but, increasingly from the 1920s on, as a threat to the Irish nation.<\/p>\n

To counter this narrow, state organized vision of culture, A.E. put all his energies into a revival of rural Ireland through organizing the Farmers\u2019 Co-operative Movement.\u00a0 He stressed that \u201cthe decay of civilization comes from the neglect of agriculture.\u00a0 There is a need to create, consciously, a rural civilization.\u00a0 You simply cannot aid the farmers in an economic way and neglect the cultural and educational part of country life\u2026On the labours of the countryman depend the whole strength and health, nay, the very existence of society, yet, in almost every country politics, economics, and social reform are urban products, and the countryman gets only the crumbs which fall from the political table. Yet the European farmers, and we in Ireland along with them, are beginning again the eternal task of building up a civilization in nature \u2014 the task so often disturbed, the labour so often destroyed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>Both A.E. and Yeats came from Protestant backgrounds and were deeply influenced by Indian thought reading the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads where sexual passion is the link between body, soul, and spirit.\u00a0 In his only novel The Avatars, A.E. wrote <\/em>\u201csuch was the play of Helen which made men realise that beauty was a divinity.\u00a0 Such was the play of Radha and Krishna which taught lovers how to evoke god and goddess in each other.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0The Avatar in Hindu thought is a spiritual being which takes human form in order to reveal the spiritual character of a race to itself such as Rama, Krishna or Jesus. In Indian thought the Avatar was always a man and came alone.\u00a0 But in A.E.\u2019s story the Avatars are a man and a woman who teach the unity of all life as seen by the love between the two.\u00a0 There is but one life, divided endlessly, differing in degree but not in kind.\u00a0 \u201cThe majesty which held constellations and galaxies, sun, stars and moons inflexibly in their paths, could yet throw itself into infinite, minute and delicate forms of loveliness with no less joy, and he knew that the tiny grass might whisper its love to an omnipotence that was tender towards it.\u00a0 What he had felt was but an infinitesimal part of that glory.\u00a0 There was no end to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>A.E. knew that he was going against the current of the moment. As he wrote \u201cThere never yet<\/p>\n

was a\u00a0 fire which did not cast dark shadows of itself.\u201d\u00a0 At the end of the novel, the Avatars are put to death, but their teaching goes on \u201cIt is this sense of the universe as spiritual<\/em> being which has become common between us, that a vast tenderness enfloods us, is about us and within us.\u201d Yet below the surface of narrow tensions in Ireland A.E. saw that \u201cWe are all laying foundations in dark places, putting the rough-hewn stones together in our civilizations, hoping for the lofty edifice which will arise later and make all the work glorious.\u201d<\/p>\n

He lived the last years of his life in London, outside of Irish politics. He had a close friendship with Henry Wallace who became the first Secretary of the USA New Deal in 1933 and saw in the efforts to help the depression-hit farmers under Wallace his hope for rural renewal.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Ren\u00e9 Wadlow, a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and of its Task Force on the Middle East, is president and U.N. representative (Geneva) of the Association of\u00a0World\u00a0Citizens<\/em> and <\/em>editor of Transnational Perspectives<\/em>. He is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment<\/a><\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cAre there not such spirits among us ready to join in the noblest of all adventures\u2014 the building up of a civilization \u2014so that the human might reflect the divine order? In the divine order there is both freedom and solidarity. It is the virtue of the soul to be free and its nature to love; and when it is free and acts by its own will, it is most united with all other life.\u201d
\n— George Russell, The Song of the Greater Life<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[214],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biographies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}