The most radical right wing deists and the most radical left wing agnostics and atheists have attributed various positive and negative qualities to the Supreme Universal Intelligence, and God has been both affirmed and denied in all the categories of these qualities, of being, of essence, of substance, of personality, of ruler, of all might, of all goodness, of all wisdom, of holiness, of righteousness, as spirit of progress and revolution. Each of these attributes, or several of them at a time, have been made the meat and substance of various philosophies and religions, and it has been the pride of various doctrines in their systems to accept or annihilate each and all of these attributes of the Godhead. But we wonder why all the writings of men, both affirmative and negative, have neglected almost completely His attribute of Creator.
The motive is plain. The attributes of goodness, of might, of holiness, of wisdom, of righteousness, are contributory to a different status than His status as Creator, to the status of God, after the seven days of creation, after the universe was made, after God had established Himself as a definite character, had recognized Himself and become recognizable as having definite attributes. He had become susceptible of analysis because He was already delivered of the child. All the affirmations and denials of God, all His images, have revolved around this, the God of the second status, the God who had reached recognition in the affairs of the universe, so to speak. But there is another status of God, which even as a symbol has been neglected, that is the status of God before the Sabbath, from the moment of conception during the process of creating and evolving the worlds and Himself.
No matter how paradoxical it may sound, this status of God is much closer to mankind, as is a mother to her child during pregnancy than after separation from it, because it is not the perfected, unreachable existence that is painted before our eyes, but a growing, fermenting, actively forming, imperfect being, striving towards perfection and completion.
Science and the new psychology, preceded by the great religions, have established in our civilizations the ideal of the sage as being the man who has reached a balance of perfection through intellectual supremacy. His visible is nothing but the visage of an old man, of the finished product, the human representation of the God image in its secondary state. The same strategy of preference, that is, the preference for the second state as against the first state in the Biblical myth, is experienced in man's attitude toward himself, his arts, his morals, and his forms of culture, society, and government.
The last stage of a work, the books in the libraries, the finished paintings and sculptures in the galleries and museums, the mercantile products of inventive ideas, the rigid standards, the ethical, psychological and physical formulae, fascinated man's imagination, became the idols around which everyone was to revolve. And it was all with the same motive as with the surface conception of God; man, after his process of creation was over, had established not only the work, but himself, had become established in personality, name, credit, might and righteousness. And because of this prosperous state, the painter, the sculptor, the legislator to cultures and civilizations, forgot, after their days of creation were over, that they had been slaves in Egypt, forgot the meagre days of continuous efforts to produce, forgot the status of creation itself, its silences, its deserts, its imperfections, its hopelessness, its inferiorities. They forgot because they did not want to observe certain changes that had almost always taken place in the man creator himself. The work was finished and the creator of it seemed to be at an advantage compared with his various phases during evolution. But he, who, while the child was still within him was radiating and crystalline, after separation from it became the owner of a child, possessor of a value which at times seemed very intimate to him, glorifier of his past, even though that past was only his yesterday. Who can tell what a self-satisfied Philistine Dante became after the creative moments of the Divine Comedy were over? The same principle is applicable to all types of creation, to a culture and a civilization as a totality. Our world needs a corrective, a glorification of the creative act, an asylum for the creator, a refuge for the thirsty and hungry souls who do not strive but for the silences and grandeurs of the moment, who in infinite modesty have dedicated their lives to the passing reality of the moment and detached themselves from the permanent glory of immortality.
Thus, the main category of a philosophy of the creator is the moment and the development of a technique which would steer the creator between the Scylla of crude spontaneity and the Charybdis of the finished work and its idolization and repetition. A procedure of this kind will lead gradually towards a re-evaluation of all past techniques, which deal with the training and mutations of the mental and nervous equipment of man.
1 The various articles on the Technique of Impromptu are excerpts from the works of J. L. Moreno. Some of them have been translated by D, P. Berenberg.
