Have you perchance read Michael Ende's "Die Unendliche Geschichte"? By all means, avoid the film like the plague. But the book is truly extraordinary.
In any case, I have been puzzling for some time over the meaning of the Kindliche Kaiserin (child empress) of Phantásien. At times, she seems a sophianic figure, and I have tried to read her that way. Ende's writing is, after all, profoundly steeped in Christian Romanticism --- like a German George MacDonald. But one of the chief characteristics of the Kindliche Kaiserin, emphasized throughout the book, is her indifference toward the moral alignment of her sundry subjects, and this struck me as inconsistent with Divine Wisdom. Yet, it must also be emphasized that the Kindliche Kaiserin is herself, so it would seem, both morally pure and --- in a veiled, ultimate sense --- wisely providential unto some final perfection.
As I read your piece on Huxley's cosmovision today, it occurred to me that the Kindliche Kaiserin might be an image of vitality, of creaturely life per se, a correspondence in Faerie to the energies of life in the ordinary world that are at once morally indifferent, embracing alike the beautiful and the ugly, the gentle and the violent, and yet paradoxically imbued with an uncompromising goodness that transcends the contingencies of natural evil.
And perhaps there is, after all, something of the sophianic in this vision...
Have you perchance read Michael Ende's "Die Unendliche Geschichte"? By all means, avoid the film like the plague. But the book is truly extraordinary.
In any case, I have been puzzling for some time over the meaning of the Kindliche Kaiserin (child empress) of Phantásien. At times, she seems a sophianic figure, and I have tried to read her that way. Ende's writing is, after all, profoundly steeped in Christian Romanticism --- like a German George MacDonald. But one of the chief characteristics of the Kindliche Kaiserin, emphasized throughout the book, is her indifference toward the moral alignment of her sundry subjects, and this struck me as inconsistent with Divine Wisdom. Yet, it must also be emphasized that the Kindliche Kaiserin is herself, so it would seem, both morally pure and --- in a veiled, ultimate sense --- wisely providential unto some final perfection.
As I read your piece on Huxley's cosmovision today, it occurred to me that the Kindliche Kaiserin might be an image of vitality, of creaturely life per se, a correspondence in Faerie to the energies of life in the ordinary world that are at once morally indifferent, embracing alike the beautiful and the ugly, the gentle and the violent, and yet paradoxically imbued with an uncompromising goodness that transcends the contingencies of natural evil.
And perhaps there is, after all, something of the sophianic in this vision...