Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

52 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

a supra-national, pan-human idealism by which we were all spell-bound, though sometimes mystified. This epic of heroic sacrifice and invincible hope of a national death and resurrection was magnified in the Serbian orator’s discourse into a sort of paradigm of the faith and destiny of mankind. .. .

What moved me to admiration even more perhaps than the majestic vision of art and civilization that he unfolded, which indeed carried us far out of our depth, was the eloquence of his exposition. I had never heard anything like it. Here was a man who spoke with authority. What he said seemed to be guaranteed by what he was, for I felt almost as if I was listening to some messenger from a higher realm of knowledge about the predicament of mankind.”

Mairet became, in his own words, “an aspirant in search of a teacher’*° with Mitrinovié as his mentor and guide. This was the role to which Mairet was to consign himself throughout his years of association with the older man; a relationship which was only broken in the early 1930s when they agreed to part for the sake of his own personal development. This, indeed, was one of the many paradoxes about Mitrinovi¢ and his relationships with those who came under his influence. On the one hand the bulk of his life was concerned with working towards a new age of freedom and fellowship, a world constituted by individuals who could freely cooperate together as self-managing parts of a functionally ordered whole. At the same time, such was the breadth and depth of his learning and wisdom, such was the power of his personality, that most of those with whom he came into contact remained in awe of him and looked to him for direction and guidance: not perhaps the most appropriate training for the creators of a new social order. It was a problem of which Mitrinovi¢ was well aware and with which he was to struggle, not always successfully, throughout his active life.

Although Mairet returned to France where he was working as a Red Cross auxiliary convinced that he had found a ‘master’ at whose feet he might sit, his ‘teacher’ continued, during the war years, with his own course of study and self-instruction. He had moved his lodgings to the Bloomsbury area, partly in order to be nearer the British Museum where he spent much of his time. His library tickets from that period show that he was studying, among other things, the Upanishads, Lao Tse, the Kabbala, and various works on occult and ancient philosophy; as well as continuing with his study of the work of Solovyov and western philosophers. He was also gaining a name for himself in certain circles as something of an expert and teacher of oriental and ancient philosophy, and began to take a few pupils for instruction. Some of these were introduced to him by Mr. G. Salby, the