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

74 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

best that is possible. It consists in discerning and being guided by Providence, and as such requires faith in the existence and immanent power of Providence.

There must be necessity and logic in the world. There must be Destiny. And it is this all-mighty power that in its working precedes the most precious of powers and dominants, the Freedom of Man; this eternal antithesis, this Satan, however, is ever grounded in the abyss of the creator's will in Providence . . . What ought to be drives and leads that which must be; not contrariwise. Freedom, the end of God and Man, ultimately realises its own most inscrutable funcHOM, 565 Humanity can obey Providence and can use Destiny. . . 3!

When those who are illumined by Providence ignore it and fail to make Destiny their instrument, chaos rules:

Obedience to Providence and heroism against Destiny is the meaning of Freedom and of men .. . Obeying Providence is the calling of Man. In this consists his co-equality with the Eternal. The Unconscious is the Father. It is supraconsciousness, the indefiniteness itself, the divineness itself, that the Son makes possible. It is Pleroma and Holy Spirit that results from the co-equality of the Son ... Man is consciousness and is conscious... To Humanity Universal, however, to Holy Spirit, individuality and personality is the gate. Freedom is the condition. Consciousness is the condition, while Creator the Father is the foundation and the ground.*2

The key, then, to the creation of an organic, harmonious world order lay with the Freewill of humanity acting in “obedience to Providence and heroism against Destiny.” This was the task that faced humanity in general, and the people of Europe and the west in particular.

In his general scheme of the evolution and history of the world and humanity Mitrinovi¢é adopted the pre-Christian framework expounded to the West by Madame Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine and developed more methodically by Rudolf Steiner. This scheme envisaged a pattern of world development by cycles or spirals of birth, growth, decay and death; with each cycle succeeded by another. In each cycle, or phase in the continuing spiral, some new faculty or quality emerged to characterise the people of that epoch. Such qualities, developments in self-awareness and knowledge about the nature of the world, were usually expressed by and through certain exceptional people who were ‘ahead of their time’—key individuals with a more developed consciousness than their contemporaries, who expressed truths about the origin and nature of reality in mythological language, and who thereby helped guide humanity ‘forwards and upwards’ towards the next phase of development. Mitrinovic conjectured that,