Word: spirit
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Long after Yü, but at the dawn of Chinese history, the Shangs sat on the throne of China (1766-1122 B.C.). They offered wine to their ancestral spirits and to the gods of the air, and poured liba tions to the gods of the earth. What remained, they drank - it could infuse spirit into even the dullest men. They poured the wine in bronze pots and cups which were shaped to a perfection that perhaps no metal work has equaled since...
Says Simone Weil: "The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits...
Threat of Destruction. ". . . This poem is a miracle. Its bitterness is the only justifiable bitterness, for it springs from the subjection of the human spirit to force, that is, in the last analysis, to matter. This subjection is the common lot, although each spirit will bear it differently, in proportion to its own virtue. No one in the Iliad is spared by it, as no one on earth is. No one who succumbs to it is by virtue of this fact regarded with contempt. Whoever, within his own soul and in human relations, escapes the dominion of force is loved...
...Such is the spirit of the only true epic the Occident possesses...
...Gospels are the last marvelous expression of the Greek genius, as the IIiad is the first: here the Greek spirit reveals itself not only in the injunction given mankind to seek above all other goods, 'the kingdom and justice of our Heavenly Father,' but also in the fact that human suffering is laid bare, and we see it in a being who is at once divine and human. The accounts of the Passion show that a divine spirit, incarnate, is changed by misfortune, trembles before suffering and death, feels itself, in the depths of its agony...