“What does it mean to become spiritual, or godly? It means to have a higher view of life, to look at life from a higher point of view. It is the high point of view in life which ennobles the soul; it is by a broad outlook on life that spiritual aristocracy is realized.” IlluminationGodlinessSufi WisdomHigher SelfSufi WayHazrat Inayat KhanThe Heart Of SufismNobility Of SoulSpiritual Aristocracy Book:The Heart of Sufism: Essential Writings of Hazrat Inayat Khan Source: The Heart of Sufism: Essential Writings of Hazrat Inayat Khan
“Just as his sentimentalism is profoundly middle-class and plebeian, but his irrationalism reactionary, so his moral philosophy also contains an inner contradiction: on the one hand, it is saturated with strongly plebeian characteristics, but on the other, it contains the germ of a new aristocratism. The concept of the ‘beautiful soul’ presupposes the complete dissolution of kalo-kagathia and implies the perfect spiritualization of all human values, but it also implies an application of aesthetic criteria to morality and is bound up with the view that moral values are the gift of nature. It means the recognition of a nobility of soul to which everyone has a right by nature, but in which the place of irrational birthrights is taken by an equally irrational quality of moral genius. The way of Rousseau’s ‘spiritual beauty’ leads, on the one hand, to characters like Dostoevsky’s Myshkin, who is a saint in the guise of an epilectic and an idiot, on the other, to the ideal of individual moral perfection which knows no social responsibility and does not aspire to be socially useful. Goethe, the Olympian, who thinks of nothing but his own spiritual perfection, is a disciple of Rousseau just as much as the young freethinker who wrote Werther.” NatureMoralityGoetheDostoevskyRousseauNobility Of SoulNew AristocracySpiritulization Book:The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism Source: The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism