Look to the art that grips you, my beloved, that elevates you and the civilisation you claim to uphold, and see in it the psyche at its source, the psyche of the divine. Or shall you raise your succeeding generations in a fog as to how you ever came to be or as to your purpose beyond where the “bitch-goddess Success” (in Williams James’s burly image) presides?  Are you destined, you nine great-grandchildren, for nothing but the pullulating ant-hill heaped upon the corpses of a befogged ancestry?

Or has a Truth obeyed my beating on the wall that can restore to the lost souls of Western Man the centrality of the divinity of his Being which the enduring matrix of Judaeo-Christianity provides for? Shall not our religion — so I propose — openly make claim to its identity with all true art, according to my criterion of inspiration? By such a claim, the dire dualism, exemplified by Descartes in 17th century Europe, dissolves; self-loss no longer giving place to self-aggrandisement; art for art’s sake no longer a meaningful endeavour; the Turner Prize no longer a travesty of the inspired painter’s name. The true creative gift of Man with its attendant demand of rigour may thus reclaim its authority by virtue of an origin we dare to name Divine. Blaise Pascal, also of the 17th century, will be cheering me.

In the embrace of our scientists — abreast of the Cosmos, attuned to quantum mechanics — I propose that all you 25 and any other in earshot of me allow for the resumption of the authority of the soul in Greeks’ first coinage as psyche (all but debased by its derivative coinages of Vienna). We are beyond the dualistic heresy of our forbears now, beyond the obsessive reductionism of truth-by-analysis, of the parts somehow greater than the whole, beyond the fear of Man’s imagination and the leap of artistic inspiration, beyond allergy to myth or intuition, allegory or analogy, beyond scorn of resounding praise for the Unnameable deity and of the impenetrable silence of the cloister.  We are ready to move on.