Towards the Spiritual Convergence of America and Russia: American Mind and Russian Soul, American Individuality and Russian Community, and the Potent Alchemy of National Characteristics - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Stephen Ludger Lapeyrouse (Ex Occidente Lux

Ex Occidente Lux — Thoughts From America’s Chrysopylae

These thoughts were written at the edge of the journey of Western Man: the geographical, historical, mental, and spiritual West of the West [5]. Chrysopylae, the Golden Gate, was named by the American John Charles Frémont, in 1846, as an intentional reminiscence of the Golden Horn (Chrysoceras) of Constantinople, to symbolically indicate a new passageway of the West towards the East. [6] Here the West faces the peoples of the Far East; not only those evoked by such names as Beijing and Tokyo, but also Nikolai N. Muravyev-Amursky’s Vladivostok, with its own Golden Horn (Zolotoy Rog) and Eastern Bosporus. [7] Man, leaving Europe, goes Westward and Eastward, and meets on the Pacific, the “Mediterranean of the Future” [8], as Alexander Herzen ‘prohetically’ named it from nineteenth-century London.

From the Golden Gate of California, the Far West faces west over the Pacific to the Far East, including Siberia. As it was spoken in an address in San Francisco, during the First World War, on August 28, 1916, by Benjamin Ide Wheeler, President of the University of California Berkeley from 1899-1919:

…Now there are many who see and know that so certain as it is that the first four centuries of the North American occupation have been shaped in terms of its place on the Atlantic facing Europe, just so certain is it that its coming life and duty is to be shapen in terms of its place on the Pacific facing Asia.

The old world consisted in substance of the Orient and Occident facing each other over the great rent at Constantinople from the Black Sea to the Eastern Mediterranean. But the venture of Columbus in its final effects turned this old world inside out. The old world looked inward upon an island sea, where Europe faced Asia Minor, and the frontier citadel was Constantinople. The new world looks outward toward the great ocean, where America faces Asia, and the frontier citadel is San Francisco. [9]

Or, as it was written in a poem by Walt Whitman in 1860:

Facing west from California’s shores,

Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,

I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar,

Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;… [10]

So as it once was, that it became proverbial, in that time when Latin was the language of the mind, to summarize the relation of East and West by the phrase Ex Oriente Lux [11]; so I am mindful with this essay, to contribute towards substantiation of a new relation, expressible: Ex Occidente Lux. [12] And though it is common, and appropriate, when speaking of the “Pacific Basin”, the “Pacific Rim”, the “Pacific Era”, and so on, to think predominately in terms of economic power and trade, international commercial and financial relationships, political and military alliances, and such; as the “light”, which towards the beginning of Western Man’s history was conceived to shine from the “Ancient Near East”, was a light of divinity, spirit, philosophy and culture, so would this my essay, at its best, add some small measure of oil, such as would contribute to a similar shining here at the West’s Chrysopylae. As it is succinctly summarized in the westward-looking University of California Berkeley’s motto: Fiat Lux: Let There Be Light. [13] But whereas once the Light from the Ancient Near East was recognized to have devolved ultimately from God to Man; here, at “the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled”, the Light [14] must be borne in and by men and women of Man, upwards to God.