The Canon of Reason and Virtue, St. Catharine of Alexandria and the Bride of Christ and History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil from the Earliest Times to the Present Day
9781465577153
418 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
This booklet, The Canon of Reason and Virtue, is an extract from the author's larger work, Lao-Tze's Tao Teh King, and has been published for the purpose of making our reading public more familiar with that grand and imposing figure Li Er, who was honored with the posthumous title Poh-Yang, i. e., Prince Positive (representing the male or strong principle); but whom his countrymen simply call Lao-tze, the Old Philosopher. Sze-Ma Ch‘ien, the Herodotus of China, who lived about 136-85 B. C., has left a short sketch of Lao-tze's life in hisShi Ki (Historical Records) which is here prefixed as the most ancient and only well-attested account to be had of the Old Philosopher. Born in 604 B. C., Lao-tze was by about half a century the senior of Confucius. He must have attained great fame during his life, for Confucius is reported to have sought an interview with him. But the two greatest sages of China did not understand each other, and they parted mutually disappointed. Confucius's visit to Lao-tze has been doubted. If it is not historical it certainly is ben trovato, for the contrast between these two leaders of Chinese thought remains to the present day. The disciples of Confucius, the so-called "literati," are tinged with their master's agnosticism and insist on the rules of propriety as the best methods of education, while the Tao Sze, the believers in the Tao, or divine Reason, are given to philosophical speculation and religious mysticism. The two schools are still divided, and have never effected a conciliation of their differences that might be attained on a common higher ground. Chwang-tze, one of Lao-tze's disciples, who lived about 330 B. C., has preserved another, an older and more elaborate, report of the meeting between Confucius and the Old Philosopher. Sze-Ma Ch‘ien (163-85 B. C.) is sometimes supposed to have derived his account from Chwang-tze, but Chwang-tze's story bears traces of legendary elements which can not but be regarded as fiction, and it is difficult to believe that the historian should have taken his sober sketch from the fantastic tale of a poet-philosopher. The names of Lao-tze's birthplace, state, province and the locality of his life's work might be considered as invented purposely because of their strange significance if they were not geographically existent. In the first edition ofLao-tze's Tao Teh Kingwe translated Cheu as "the State of Plenty," and will only add that the word is made up of the characters "mouth" and "to use," its original meaning being "to supply everywhere; to make a circuit all around or everywhere; and plenty." The Cheu dynasty was so called because the emperor's power reached all over the civilized world, according to Chinese notions. In the present edition we have preferred to translate the word Cheu by "the State of Everywhere." It would be easy to say that the Old Philosopher was a citizen of Everywhere, and was born in Good Man's Bend to describe his innate character; that his home was situated in Thistle District of Bramble Province to indicate the poverty and difficulties with which his life was surrounded. We have seen in a former article ("The Bride of Christ," published in The Open Court for August) that the tradition of the bride of Christ has its ultimate foundation in the myths of pre-Christian saviours; but we noted at the same time that according to the rigidly ascetic traditions of the early Church this marriage was to be a purely spiritual and symbolic one; and that the legend finally crystallized around the name of Catharine the pure one, in spite of the incongruity of the age in which the best known saint of this name was supposed to have lived. In the domain of myth as well as legend we move in an atmosphere that is above time and space, and so there is no inconsistency in the fact that St. Catharine of Alexandria lived at the end of the third century, more than two hundred years after the death of Jesus.
