Matthew Murphy > Recent Status Updates

Reading Artist’s Words

German Romanticisim and French Aesthetic Theory

We cannot suppose we see artists in the form of their art; and when we raise the metaphor of style a power, from the distinc character of the stylus, pen, or hand of an individual to the stylus, pen or hand of a place or time, the Central Italian Style or the Renaissance style — we have introduced even more problems. Place and time in effect become “super artists” anthropomorphic entities in their own right.

Lecture V, 6 June 1934

Philosophy and religion are just like psychology in that you can never stare a definite principle: it is quite impossible, for a thing which is true for one stage of development is quite untrue for another. So it is always a question of development, of time; the best truth for a certain stage is perhaps poison for another.

We must keep in mind, then, that what we say about God is made of our own psychology; we cannot get beyond that fact. It is our language, our own brain cells, our individual experience, and we cannot prove that anything in our conception could possibly touch the real being of what we call God. It is almost futile to make such formulations because we can never really prove them; we can only ask.

Lecture III, 16 May 1934

As a matter of fact the greater part of the Christian dogma is Persian in origin, it comes from the Zoroastrian traditions.

Now there are numbers of archetypal situations and the whole of them make up the world of mythology. Mythology is the text book of archetypes, of course not rationally elucidated and explained but simply represented like a picture or a story book.

The old wise man is a typical figure and therefore we call it an archetype; one meets it in legends and folklore and in innumerable texts and works of art, which shows that it is a generally human idea.

Lecture II, 9 May 1934

“It is the same awkward situation that we have in Christianity, where we are also not quite sure what the relationship is between God and the devil. Is it a co-dominion with God? -or what is it? That Christian awkwardness is an old inheritance from Persia…

…the monotheism of Ahura Mazda was split up into a multitude of gods, like the splitting up of God into the Trinity and then into many saints and so on.

Ch. 8 "Rhetorical Categories in the Academy"