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

82 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

Mitrinović was calling in the first instance for ‘new Europeans’ rather than a new Europe. The responsibility of exemplary leadership lay with individuals to make Europe, and eventually the world, “consciously and self-consciously one.” Whilst so much of the “World Affairs” series was an attempt to sketch out imaginatively and mythologically the nature of an organic world order and the role of different races and nations in such a morphology; the movement towards such Universal Humanity was indivisible from the transformation of individuals and individual consciousness. Mitrinovic defined socialism not as “any particular system of organisation, dictatorial or anarchist, but a self-ordering of man, based on the nature of the individual and collective soul of mankind.” As such, the attainment of socialism, Universal Humanity, required changes in individual thought, feeling, and action. It could never be achieved so long as the jingo-ism and individualistic ethos characteristic of Europe and the western world was the ruling one. For socialism to be created it was necessary that individuals identify with the rest of humanity as a whole rather than with their own particular nation, class or tribe. But humanity is not an abstract category, it is represented by one’s neighbours, colleagues and all other disparate individuals. For socialism to work, then, it was necessary for each individual to acknowledge that their neighbours and all those with whom they came into direct and indirect contact were of equal significance and value as themselves. They must really feel as the writer of the Epistle to the Romans phrased it, “As we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office; so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members of one another.” (Romans 12, 4-5) Sophia, the Holy Spirit, could only be incarnated by and as a community of free, self-conscious individuals; individuals who had transcended the individualistic ethic to a new “supra-human” consciousness, something akin to Solovyov’s depiction of love: “The meaning and value of love as a feeling consists in the fact that it makes us actually, with our whole being, recognise in another the absolute central significance which owing to egoism we feel in ourselves only.”64

It was only through the consciously creative action of those that yalued others as much as themselves that Universal Humanity could be realised. “Self-resurrection and self-creation are the infinite need of the human race today ...,” wrote Mitrinovi¢, “Beginning from the individual selftranscendence and ending with the resurrection of Sophia from her chaos, human consciousness demands in this hour a new and holy breaking up and a new mystery.”® If the world was a single living organism with the different races as constituent organs; then the cells of these organs and the organism itself were made up of the individual members of the different