Mysticism, Logic, Yin, Yang, and Fanaticism

Patrick has this poster in his room.

There are times when I'm reading something, exploring ideas, and the imagery of this poster pops into my head for the duration. This is a primal symbolic key... it is always relevant. It's actually the basis for how I approach pretty much any new idea.

Yin and Yang. Dark, Light. Female, Male.

Mysticism, Logic.

I was delighted today to come across this bit of writing from Gilbert Magazine. (I found the link in a comment discussion at the Gates of Vienna blog.)

This article is timely in so many ways. Not the least of which is that it brings up Tolstoy, which is connected again to Patrick, and to the whole "all things Russian" interest that we've got going around here. I haven't talked about that here on the blog, but it's been in the background for a while now since Patrick's taking Russian at IU.

Anyway. A couple of relevant bits of the article on Fanaticism, linked above (God, I Love this!):

“Fanaticism has nothing at all to do with religion,” Chesterton affirms. The origins of fanaticism lie elsewhere and neither science nor politics nor academia is immune from it. Tolstoy was no doubt a genius. He had great faith. He lacked only one thing. “He is not a mystic and therefore he has a tendency to go mad.”

This passage recalls Chesterton's discussion of the maniac in Orthodoxy. The maniac is not a man with many ideas that tend to balance each other off in common sense. Rather he is a man with one idea according to which he sees all else in a distorted light. Tolstoy “is not a mystic; and therefore he has a tendency to go mad. Men talk of the extravagances and frenzies that have been produced by mysticism; they are a mere drop in the bucket. In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane.” It is the mystic who is open to all things, even if they seem at first not to make sense.

And then:

Chesterton comes to his main point. “The thing that has driven them mad was logic.” The poets were less likely to go insane than the scientists—the “mad scientist” is a well-known character, in fact. Tolstoy was deficient in poetry. “The only thing that kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism—the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem.”

You've got to read the whole thing. Let it seep into your consciousness through the mystical senses. Maybe it's just me, but this article feels steeped in so much more. You could say it is much more than it seems.

Yin and Yang are both necessary, I think. Mysticism coupled with Logic.