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

22) LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIĆ

that possessed by his friends and compatriots at home. At the same time, during the periods he spent in Rome, he intensifted his own personal study of modern and ancient, western and eastern philosophies and religions which further broadened and deepened his perspective on the world. Moreover, there was a new generation of political activists emerging in the Balkans who, influenced by the example of Bogdan Zeraji¢é, had been converted to the idea and practice of political assassination as a means of struggle against Hapsburg rule. Whilst Mitrinovi¢ sympathised with the ultimate ends of people like Gavrilo Princip, he was opposed to the means they advocated. He was totally opposed to violence as a means of revolutionary change. The real task lay in preparing people, morally and culturally, for the new society.

In many ways, then, “Aesthetic Contemplations” marked a new stage of development in Mitrinovic’s approach to the problems of the world and its transformation, and presaged many of the themes which were to dominate the rest of his life and which he was to explore both in his writing and in his living. In “Aesthetic Contemplations” he had described the task that lay ahead:

We must gather the riches inherited from other generations, order them, test them, distribute them, give life to them, utilise them according to justice and for the universal progress. We must digest all history and create from it an unshakeable, unchangeable, universal, single foundation beneath us . . .

Some twenty years later Basil Boothroyd was to say of Mitrinovic that he had a neurosis the size of Nelson’s Column and it was called “synthesis.”*! Despite the irreverance, there was a deal of truth in the remark. The search for synthesis in all fields was a guiding passion of his life. He was concerned not just with synthesis of the arts, the breaking down of the barriers that divided different disciplines, but ultimately with the synthesis of the world as a whole, the establishment of what he came to refer to as “Universal Humanity,” the transformation of the world into a true home for the family of mankind, the transcendence of all the differences that divided people from each other and the creation of a new order within which people might acknowledge their differences but respect each other as equal members of a common human fellowship and family.

In a series of articles that appeared in Orage’s The New Age in the early 1920s Mitrinovi¢ was to develop the idea of humanity as a single organism with all the different groupings of people throughout the world having their own specific contribution to make in their different ways to the maintenance and well-being of the whole. The sketch of a functional ordering of the world developed in the columns of The New Age allowed for and