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

118 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

our own collective human reality and our single human selves are that Spirit which is God. Such is the human quest . . .*°

Tt was essential that people in the West should guide this quest. It was in the West that individualism had developed furthest, although this in turn entailed the danger that western man would remain entrapped “in the seductive experience of mere individualism, of materialist self-divinisation.”*! To avert this, some kind of synthesis between the worldviews of the East and West was necessary. Although people in the East had still not attained “the proper rational individuation” of the West, they possessed its necessary counterpoint: the awareness of the organic relatedness of all things, “the universal awareness, the experience of the inner, of the whole.”*?

Whilst a key role fell to Israel, the Jewish people, to work towards the necessary synthesis between the world views of East and West, the major responsibility for the future of the world order lay with the western hemisphere, and with Europe in particular:

. . . the integration and synthesis of the Western world is a preliminary and essential task of human guidance . . . World synthesis, the organic order of our race must be preceded by the Western synthesis and purification. Needful for the human whole is the self-attainment of the Western mankind . . . The self-creation and greatness of our kingdom is at stake and is in the keeping, is given to the human care of the Western hemisphere with Europe as its seed and focus.*?

Such integration depended, finally, however, upon the initiatives and actions of free, self-conscious individuals:

... The chief issue of the world-crisis is the birth of the Spirit of our Whole in our single souls. From the New Birth in singles depends the era which is in front of us: the era of world planning and planetary building, of luxurious plenty of material abundance .. .4

The articles proved as unfathomable and as frustrating to many readers of New Britain as the first “World Affairs” had to the readers of The New Age. “Why in the name of sanity must you publish articles like the one in this week’s issue by M. M. Cosmoi?” demanded one correspondent. “Is it necessary for M. M. Cosmoi, writing on World Affairs, to use the language of mysticism? Why this tortuous and involved, not to say obscure, literary style? Why all these strange new words?” begged another.*? Purdom, who described Mitrinovic’s contributions as the most outstanding of all the work published during his time as editor of New Britain,*® advised patience and recommended his own method of reading “World Affairs” to the protestors: