Vivian de Sola Pinto (1895–1969)

I like Peter Sterry quite a bit. His thought is both mystical and fairly dense in complexity. I came across him while studying the Cambridge Platonists. They were a group of instructors affiliated with Cambridge college during the period of the English commonwealth. Most of them were called latitudinarians because they supported less restrictions on matters of faith and conscience. They were often strongly Protestant in theology but also Platonist and Neoplatonist in philosophy. Their ideas are interesting, but so far I have been the most impressed with Sterry. His discourse is more than cursorily poetic. His mystical tendencies are very hard to separate from his theological and philosophical tendencies, although some compilers have attempted to do just that. This compilation is more honest than the McMahon treatment in that regard. Sterry really made it clear to me that not all Puritans were cut from the same cloth. The introduction includes a great biography of Sterry and a breakdown of his theology. This book is really a great introduction to the man and his thought, but his works need to be read as a whole, not just as brief extracts. This really only provides a glimpse into his brilliance.… (meer)

Edited by De Sola Pinto with Introduction, Commentary, Notes and Indices. The biographies are dryly "historical". For example, noting John Bunyan's beginnings with "normal life" as a tinker who married a pious woman (and from then on Bunyan's life completely changes, a coincidence not mentioned along with his wife's name!), "The Pilgrim's Progress" published in 1678 was written in prison -- Bunyan's 2d imprisonment for preaching.

Modern readers must find some appeal in the variety of poems here. From panegyrics love poems, ballads, and lampoons. While Dryden is not included -- he gets his own book on this publisher's "shelf" -- we find Rochester, Waller, Sedley, Sackville, Cotton, Butler, Bunyan and Chipman as well as a few others "less well-known". And we have translations -- of Catallus! "Nay, Lesbia, never ask me this, / How many kisses will suffice?"… (meer)

Often as a book collector I find books that I like to hold in my hands, that are equally appealing to the fingers, the eye, and the mind. Rarely, but gratefully, I find a book that I want to imprint upon my heart. The Tree of Life, an anthology “made” by Vivian de Sola Pinto and George Neill Wright (Oxford UP, 1929), is just such a book. I read a passage or two from it, then I cannot help but close its covers and hold it in my hands, lay it on my chest, close my eyes, and let it rest there — as if somehow it might radiate within my breast, its spirit communing with my spirit. As I like to lie in the summer sun, offering my flesh to its light and warmth, so I lie with these words (this Word) upon my heart, hoping my soul will absorb its boundless light and warmth.

In a bare-bones preface, the compilers express regret that religious and moral conceptions once associated with ancient myths or superstitions have often been discarded, the religion along with the primitive cosmologies. The 540 passages they have collected, they hope, will represent “by means of the interfusing effect of poetry” what one modern writer has called “an alliance between religion, which must be retained unless the world is to perish, and complete rationality, which must come unless the world is also to perish,.”

The passages are presented on the page, simply numbered, to preserve continuity of thought.” Ah, indeed. The feel of the fine paper, the attractive arrangement of the texts on the page, the simple illustration of the tree of life on the title page, the dark cloth cover, the well-chosen epigraphs, the division of the passages into six chapters with running headings on the verso pages serving as guideposts to the continuity of thought: with what dignity and elegance, the passages are allowed to speak.

One begins with spiritual inevitability, expressed so eloquently in Psalm 139.7-18. “If I take the wings of the morning / And dwell in the uttermost part of the sea; / Even there shall thy hand lead me, / And thy right hand shall hold me.” That is followed immediately with the Simplon Pass passage from Wordsworth’s Prelude (6.624-40, 1850 ed.), in which the poet reads in the terrifying wonders of Nature “Characters of the great Apocalypse, / The types and symbols of Eternity, / Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.” One concludes the collection with Dante in his Paradiso 3.79-89. “We pleasure the whole realm without surcease, / And please the King who inwills us with His Own; / His will is consummation of our peace; / And everything is moving to that sea,— / All it creates as nature gives increase.” Many of the passages are familiar; many are not. Each speaks with its own voice and lingers in one’s ear; each rests humbly and comfortably in the sequence, as all together they build up a sense of presence, of community, of a spiritual essence.

But let me be more mundane: the passages are numbered, and the numbered notes at the back of the book give the source and occasionally brief notes on translations, origins, meanings, and the like. The divisions are God and the World, The Garden of God, The Sacred Fountain, The Son of Man, Heaven and Hell, and Life Everlasting. But don’t let those lead you to expect some narrow, puritanical focus in the selections. Rather, the compilers have attempted to bring together passages that demonstrate and represent “the essential unity of religion.” As a casual reading of the index will show you, the most frequently quoted sources are William Blake, Robert Bridges (the English Poet Laureate at the time, and the person to whom the book is dedicated), Samuel Butler, St. John, St. Matthew, Milton, St. Paul, Plato, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley (the most frequently quoted of all), Thomas Traherne, and William Wordsworth — hardly narrow fundamentalists.

Every page has thought-provoking assertions; every page has its share of quotable quotes. George Santayana has only two passages included, but one of them, at the very heart of the book (#192), comes as close as any to the unifying theme and the underlying philosophy: “To worship mankind as it is would be to deprive it of what alone makes it akin to the divine — its aspiration. . . . The indwelling ideal lends all the gods their divinity.” Shelley’s Apollo speaks for us all: “I am the eye with which the Universe / Beholds itself and knows itself divine . . . .”

When the book came into my possession, it still had a number of uncut pages. The book collector in me hesitated to disturb its virginal innocence, but a book is to be read, and I could not deprive myself of any of its passages. If I had not accessed the pages with #47, for example, I would not have experienced Blake’s epigram (“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite”) as the conclusion to a sequence of passages on the creation. Just a few excerpts will show you how one passage speaks to another, and how beauty and continuity are balanced and maintained:

What lovely things
Thy hand hath made:
The smooth-plumed bird
In its emerald shade,
The seed of the grass,
The speck of stone
Which the wayfaring ant
Stirs — and hastes on! (#43, Walter de la Mare)

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? (#44, William Blake)

Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee;
He eateth grass as an ox.
Lo now, his strength is in his loins,
And his force is in the navel of his belly. (#45, Job 40.15ff)

He [David] sung of God — the mighty source
Of all things — the suspended force
On which all strength depends;
From whose right arm, beneath whose eyes,
All period, pow’r, and enterprize
Commences, reigns, and ends. (#46, Christopher Smart)

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear as it is, infinite. (#47, Blake)

Blessed are the poor in heart, for they shall see God . . . .

. . . . God, it has been asserted, was contemplated by Jesus Christ as every poet and every philosopher must have contemplated that mysterious principle. He considered that venerable word to express the overruling Spirit of the collective energy of the moral and material world. . . .

. . . . And those who have seen God have, in the period of their purer and more perfect nature, been harmonized by their own will to so exquisite [a] consentaneity of powers as to give forth divinest melody when the breath of universal being sweeps over their frame. (#48, Percy Bysshe Shelley)

O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live . . . . (#49, William Wordsworth)

But I am handling this delicate book too roughly. It needs, and deserves, a gentler touch. So I shall rest my case, and let the book rest for a while upon my chest. Though I may have erred in my enthusiasm, or in my attempt to represent the book’s mode,

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough hew them how we will. (#202, William Shakespeare)

MY MEMORY FAILS ME. FORGETTING THAT I HAD ALREADY REVIEWED THIS BOOK ONCE, I JUST DID IT AGAIN. SO, RICKING SUPERFLUITY AND DUPLICATION, HERE IS MY WAY OF SAYING THE SAME THINGS ONCE AGAIN:

Finding such a book as this one can transform one’s regular trips to used-book stores into sacred pilgrimages. The Tree of Life (1929), an anthology, was “made” by Vivian de Sola Pinto and George Will Wright. Of the “making” of such books, let there be no end. The size of the book in one’s hand, the feel of deckle-edge pages to one’s fingers, just the look of the small blocks of print and wide white margins convey a sense of elegance, yet simplicity. There are no subheadings within each “book,” only a different running head on each recto page. The only color and visual design are on the title page where the tree itself exudes an almost golden light. And, believe it or not, when I got home with it, I realized a good many of the pages were still uncut. I have left a few, just to preserve the chaste purity of this immaculate ensign. “There is a growing perception,” the compilers assert in their brief prefatory remarks, “that modern scientific discoveries have destroyed, and are destroying, not the essentials of religion, but the garments of magic and superstition in which they have often been clothed.”

Their purpose in this collection is to realize an “alliance between religion . . . and rationality.” Their approach has been to bring together “a collection of passages designed to illustrate this essential unity of religious, philosophic, and poetic thought as expressed in ancient and modern literature.” So be it. The passages are allowed to stand without comment or introduction, even without the writers’ names. They follow one after another, without interruption, simply numbered, 540 of them in all. Thus juxtaposed, they challenge the mind and engage the person. Of course, if curiosity gets the best of you (as mine often does), you can find the sources of each passage in notes, handy at the back of the volume. Grouped into six “books,” the passages grapple with the questions that provoke most of us most of the time: God and the World, the Garden of God, the Sacred Fountain, the Son of Man, Heaven and Hell, and Life Everlasting..

Just a quick survey of one of those themes will demonstrate the character and scope of the work. “The Sacred Fountain” opens with epigraphs from Shakespeare, the book of Numbers, and William Blake:

. . . The prophetic soule,
Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come . . .

Would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets, . . .

What is the Divine Spirit? is the Holy Ghost any other
than an Intellectual Fountain?

Immediately one is plunged into Spinoza, Schopenhauer, St. Paul, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, John Donne, Jean Jacques Rousseau, William Law, Johannes Eckhardt, Henry More, Henrik Ibsen, Oliver Cromwell, and the list goes on - philosophers, theologians, poets, novelists scriptures, from Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici to Anton Tchekov’s letters, from the Koran to Alfred North Whitehead. These writers bump into one another, requiring rereading, reflecting, and inter-illumination. They comment on (and actually themselves model) sources of inspiration, the indwelling of divine vision within human consciousness.

My intention was to quote from a few passages within this group, illustrating the compilers’ method, but once I get started, limiting myself to just a few has been difficult. Perhaps I should simply choose a few at random:

182. And I, my friend, am as much as part of Nature as my own finger is a part of me. If my finger is the organ by which I grasp the sword and the mandoline, my brain is the organ by which Nature strives to understand itself. . . .

194. I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it. That is the law of my life.

245 Joan. I hear voices telling me what to do. They come from God.
Robert. They come from your imagination.
Joan. Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us.

248. All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially.

At random? Well, only partly. In case you’re curious, the first three are all from George Bernard Shaw, the first two, Man and Superman, the third, St. Joan. The fourth quotation is from Shelley’s Defense of Poetry. But if I had chosen at random, the passages would have been just as interesting.

I have tried a good many books called devotionals or meditations. Most of them are but candles of light, compared to this one, which is the stars in the night sky.… (meer)