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

THE NEW AGE 71

Moreover,

Nothing less than such a psychological view of the world can possibly enable us to form correct judgments, since, in its absence, no other criterion of value can ever be adopted than that of self-preservation or self-extension by means of force...... Unless there is and can consciously be conceived a non-arbitrary common world-responsibility, resting equally according to their respective genius, situation, and history, upon every race and nation, nothing remains but to abandon every issue to mere force. That then would be right that succeeded in establishing itself; and every effort to survive and to dominate would become justified.

Mitrinovié regarded the doctrine of the Trinity in the Athanasian Creed as the most precise expression of the dynamic principles and morphology of an organism. As such it formed an essential background to the complete series of articles in The New Age. In the statement of the Athanasian Creed the Father begets the Son, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son. However, in the Athanasian Creed, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit do not just succeed each other, they also co-exist as equals with one another: “The Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God.” All three are distinct and differentiated, and yet they are all equally God. The doctrine of the Trinity asserted, according to Mitrinovic,

.. mot as a theory or a wish, but as an immanent as well as transcendental fact of nature, the equal and independent yet interdependent functions of the three persons, of whom Mankind is one*>

Following the doctrine of the Athanasian Creed in his articles, Mitrinovi¢ found:

._..the concepts of the world as one and yet three; of the human spirit as simultaneously and equally requiring the recognition of God, the Universe and Man; of Man as the Son and not the servant, still less the antithesis, of God; of Man as the consciousness of God, with God as the unconscious of Man.”®

According to Mitrinovié’s reading, the Father was the unconscious, that mysterious power within the universe and within the individual human being. It was not God the Father who was endowed with attributes of personality and self-consciousness. Rather, the personality and self-consciousness of God resided in the Son. It was Jesus of Nazareth who declared himself to be the Son of God and “was to become, by his own Promethean act, the individual consciousness of God.” Humanity, in the person of the Son, was to

declare himself divinely omnipotent with the Father ... announce himself as

the ‘saviour of God,’ God’s consciousness, and as indispensable to the Father