The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol X: Later Article: Uncollected Articles, Reviews, and Radio Broadcasts Written After 1900 by William Butler Yeats

Author:William Butler Yeats [Yeats, William Butler]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: SOC035000
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2010-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

II

Cardinal Mercier writes in his Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy, Vol. 1, p. 314, English Edition: ‘Plato and Descartes, who both considered the soul as a substance completely distinct from the body, make it reside in some central part whence, like a pilot at the helm, it can control the movements of the whole organism. By Plato the rational soul is placed in the brain, whilst Descartes relegates it to the minute portion of it called the pineal gland. St Thomas’s opinion, to which we adhere, is entirely different; he lays down that the soul is wholly present in the whole body and in all its parts—anima rationalis est tota in toto corpore et tota in qualibet parte corporis.’347

For centuries the Platonizing theology of Byzantium had dominated the thought of Europe. Amidst the abstract splendour of its basilicas stood saints with thought-tortured faces and bodies that were but a framework to sustain the patterns and colours of their clothes. The mosaics of the Apse displayed a Christ with face of pitiless intellect, or a pinched, flat-breasted virgin holding a child like a wooden doll. Nobody can stray into that little Byzantium chapel at Palermo, which suggested the chapel of the Grail to Wagner,348 without for an instant renouncing the body and all its works and sending all thought up into that heaven the pseudo Dionysius, the Areopagite, fashioned out of the Platonic ideas.349

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