Spencer Heath Archive

Item 115

Pencil by Heath on notepad page.

September 30, 1952

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

The Esthetic Transformation

Creature to Creator

From Man, the Animal to Man, the God.

All living creatures, merely as creatures, strive only to live. They are parasites on their environment — predators on the life that it affords. The higher forms, those more complex and more enduring, consume and thus degrade the lower forms. And the lower forms, in turn, revel for a time in the obsequies of the higher. But the higher forms are the more enduring, hence tend to prevail. But for this, there could have been no organic evolution of life into higher forms.

Man, the human animal, has evolved out of Nature, out of the work of, hence out of the mind of, God.

He is a particular form of life, out of life in general — the specific out of the Absolute, yet endowed with potentiality of the Absolute — with capacity for emergence into creative power, that is, into spiritual, or divine power — Man, the creature, the animal, on his way to becoming a Creator, a God.

This Gift of the spirit is not attained by the solitary man. Unorganized, the most he can achieve is to survive. Nor can man, as family or as tribe, do more. He lives on the bounty of environment which he destroys. Thus as nomad he must move ever on towards greener fields than those he has destroyed and turned brown.

Thus the primitive nomad, the unregenerate, the non-spiritual man, is mendicant and suppliant of the bounty of nature, of the raw gifts of God, which he perennially destroys, and to live must move on.

Yet where the bounty is great by long accumulation, as in delta and fertile crescent he may long abide. His tribes become nations, nations of slaveries under sovereignties, that perennially make wars, extending their sovereign sway over subjects as slaves. Dynasties rise and fall till rulers and subjects alike degenerate and virile nomads from harsher land impose their sway, weaken and are in turn themselves destroyed until the lion and the lizard prowl a famished land.

In the harsher lands where nature is less kind it is tribes that come and go. In the lusher lands the rhythm is longer. Here nations abide for a time ere they rise and fall. In the lusher lands not God’s great bounty alone is more slowly destroyed. Here the richness of the earth yields substance and power to rulers, from the toil and tax of subject masses. “Man’s inhumanity to man,” sovereignty and slavery, are rooted in the richness of the ancient soils, whoe’er it be that rules.